


World Behind Windows

by InsaneTrollLogic



Series: Worlds [1]
Category: Dark Angel, Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Gen, Life on Mars AU, Plotty, Season/Series 04, Time Travel, pulling a Sam Tyler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 10:56:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 29,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1344883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsaneTrollLogic/pseuds/InsaneTrollLogic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Logan gets shot. That’s when things get strange.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LJ, completed 12/22/2008.

Logan gets shot in 2019. He is sure of this much. He is transporting a witness for one of Eyes Only’s latest cases and he gets shot. In his head, he knows he’s bleeding out and he knows it’s 2019.   
  
But he wakes up in 2009. He doesn’t know it’s 2009, not immediately. He just wakes up in a back alley realizing that it’s a lot cleaner then the normal back alley. His head hurts. From the street outside, someone shoots him a disapproving glare like it’s taboo to wake up outside in an alley in Post Pulse Seattle instead of the norm. Logan hauls himself to his feet and runs his hands down the back of his spine feeling for blood, feeling for the bullet hole, but there’s nothing there. There’s no injury save the growing lump on his forehead. He’s taken knocks before, but it’s been a while since one was so bad he didn’t know where he was.  
  
A second later he remembers Lauren and Sophie and Edgar Sonreisa and the transfer. He pushes himself up to his feet and breaks into a run. He can’t be that far from the safe house and Lauren would be there ready to testify and things would be all right.  
  
It takes him two blocks to know something’s wrong. Really, really wrong because the buildings, they’re in good repair. Hell, they’re outright gleaming when there should be grunge and dirt and homeless people all over the place. But there’s not. There are people in suits and expensive watches and on the street corner, that was a Starbucks. There hasn’t been Starbucks since before the Pulse.  
  
He gets a look at the newspaper.  
  
2009  
  
It’s January 2nd 2009.   
  
He starts running. He knows these streets after all. They’re cleaner then his streets, just how he remembers everything from before. The streets haven’t changed since 2009, haven’t changed since the Pulse put a halt on all expansion. This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.   
  
But he knows how to make it right. It’s going to be right when he gets to the safe house because it’s 2019 and Logan’s not crazy. No, Logan’s had an accident and his mind has snapped back to the last time he felt safe. Back before the Pulse and before Eyes Only and before he had a purpose. And everything’s going to be all right when he gets to the safe house because Lauren will be there and be ready to testify.   
  
He is stopped just outside the house by the sight of a car, because this car, she’s magnificent. A relic sure, but magnificent. A sleek black Chevy Impala restored to near perfect condition. Logan hasn’t seen a car like this in almost ten years. Hasn’t seen it since the Pulse made the gas guzzling muscle cars a thing of the distant past. You’d run across them sometimes, rusted over and cannibalized for scrap muscle, but nothing like this.  
  
He runs a hand, almost lovingly, across the hood. He can feel slight deformations, like the car’s been banged up recently but that doesn’t matter, that gives her character. Finally, he stops takes a deep breath and blunders into the safe house. “Lauren,” he calls. “Lauren! Sophie!”  
  
Lauren and Sophie are not here. This is not the same place Logan had set up so carefully the night before. There are papers coating the wall, strange things about disappearances and deaths with the odd parts circled boldly in red. Logan presses his hands to his head. He can hear sirens now coming from the distance pulsing in his head. There are voices he can’t quite make out, saying things like,  _hold on, Mister we’re going to get you out of here_  and _severe internal trauma._  
  
“Who the hell are you?” a voice asks and the voice is so loud, it drowns out all the others.  
  
The scene focuses abruptly and Logan’s left staring at a man. Late twenties if he has to guess with brown hair, striking features and an intimidating presence. “Who the hell am I?” Logan asks. “Who the hell am I? Who the hell are you? Where’s Sophie? Where’s Lauren?” He grabs the man by the shoulders and slams him into the wall. “What have you done with them?”  
  
“You have got to be kidding me,” the man growls and there’s a short, violent burst of movement and then Logan’s the one pressed up against the wall. “I don’t know who the hell you are but you don’t get to do this. Now what’s your name?”  
  
“This is ridiculous,” Logan says, trying to push past him. The man catches him and shoves him back and the whiplash nearly takes Logan out all on its lonesome. “You’re not real,” Logan hisses. “I don’t know what part of my subconscious you crawled out of, but you’re not real so get out of my way.”  
  
Logan pushes past the man briskly, noting the solid thud of shoulder on shoulder. The contact makes him pause because if nothing else, that feels real.   
  
“Not real,” the man grumbles and there’s a fist sailing towards Logan’s face with such velocity that it knocks his whole body off kilter. Indignant, he starts to protest that you shouldn’t hit a man with glasses and then he blinks blearily and realizes for the first time in quite some time that he is wearing contacts. He hasn’t been able to find contacts after the Pulse hit. “Did that feel real to you?” the man growls. “Now tell me your name or we’re up for round two.”  
  
“Logan,” he says, rubbing at the small trail of blood leaking out one nostril. “Logan Cale.”  
  
“Wait, wait, wait a second,” the man says, pressing both hands to his forehead. “Logan Cale? Did Bobby send you?”  
  
Logan has no contacts named Bobby. He knows no one who could be connected to this loose cannon with a wall plastered in obituaries. He swallows, presses his eyes shut and wills himself to wake up. There’s no reason for him to be here. No reason for any of it. “Tell me something,” Logan says. “What year is it?”  
  
The man laughs harshly. “Don’t worry about it. World’s not due for an apocalypse for another three years.” Off Logan’s blank look, he rolled his eyes. “2009, all right? January 2nd 2009. You must have had one hell of a new year.”  
  
Logan stumbles over to the bed, collapsing on the edge and putting his face in his hands. “What’s your name?”  
  
The man eyes him suspiciously. “I don’t know what sort of game your—“ He blinks, stops and shakes his head as if unwilling to put the effort into fighting. “I’m Dean. Dean Winchester.”  
  
Logan looks up. He’s  _heard_  of Dean Winchester. It’s a name from his past, from everyone’s past. In his day, Dean Winchester had been the most famous serial killer in the states. The Winchester brothers, Sam and Dean had crossed the country committing violent, bizarre murders like something out of the X-Files. But he’d died in early 2008. Died in a helicopter crash when the police had finally caught up with him. Justice served.  
  
“Dean Winchester,” he repeats and lets out a strangled half laugh. “Of course you’re Dean Winchester. In 2009. Dean Winchester.” He stands up, shaking. “If you’re really Dean Winchester, where’s your brother, Sam?”  
  
It’s the wrong thing to say and Logan knows it the instant the words are out of his mouth. Something slams shut on Winchester’s face and he’s speaking slowly when he says, “Look, I realize Bobby keeps sending you stooges to keep an eye on me, but I’m fine. I’m just peachy keen. I’m going to find my brother and I’m going to save him and none of you people are going to stop me. And you can just go get the hell out.”  
  
“What?” Logan sputters.   
  
“If you’re not going to help, you can just get the hell out. I don’t need your help. I just need my brother back.”  
  
“Fine,” Logan says.  
  
“Fine,” Dean echoes.  
  
Logan leaves and Dean watches him go. Dean Winchester, confirmed killer of more then twenty people, suspected killer of dozens more, watches as Logan stumbles out of the safe house (his safe house) and into the too bright gleam of pre-Pulse Seattle. He finds himself retracing his steps, hands in his pockets, trying not to look at these people. They don’t know what they have. They are walking through life, skating through it, worried about their corner-office jobs and their stock and it’s all going to be gone in six months. The city is going to turn on him and ten years later Logan will still be trying to get it back.  
  
He’s back in 2009, back in the alley where this all started. Logan takes a deep breath. He’s got to go through this methodically. He’s got to look at this like any other case. Got to forget that he’s probably insane and try to figure out the puzzle his brain set up with him.  
  
There’s something behind the dumpster. A black duffle bag. Logan moves toward it, half expecting a bomb, but he forces himself to remember that this isn’t real, that this is a dream. He tugs the zipper open in one fell swoop and nothing explodes. In the bag there’s clothes. Jeans, shirts, over shirts, all in his size, all the sort of thing he might have worn when he was in his twenties.  
  
And he is in his twenties. If this is really 2009, somewhere out there, Logan Cale is twenty years old, a sophomore at Yale, working on the school paper and chasing tail. He takes a deep breath and fumbles through the shirts until a sharp prick caused him to pull back. He blinks and went back to his search a little more carefully this time.   
  
There’s a knife in the bag. A wickedly sharp blade that has slipped out of its sheath. Logan looks at it in confusion before setting it carefully aside and continuing his search with more caution. The next thing he finds is a gun. Fully loaded with bullets that aren’t lead but silver. His head is killing him. He can hear his heart beating in his throat. There’s a phantom pain in his spine. His hands latch onto a leather wallet and he flips it open without hesitation. It’s a driver’s license. The driver’s license of Logan Cale born in November 11th 1978. And that is him in that picture. It’s him--which means that in whatever twisted up world this is, this is his bag, this is him carrying a knife and a gun loaded with silver bullets. He feels dizzy, feels physically ill.  
  
Somehow the dull Seattle light seems brighter then usually. Everything looks overexposed, like the blinding sterility of a hospital. His heart is beating a dull roar in his head and he can hear voices like there’s someone standing right next to him.  
  
 _BP’s dropping! We’re going to need to prep him for a transfusion!_  
  
Patient is non-responsive. We’re losing him!  
  
“Losing me?” Logan repeats. “You’re not losing me! I’m right here.”  
  
 _Someone get me a crash cart!_  
  
There’s a staccato of heartbeat playing in Logan’s ears but the rhythm is all off. He clutches at his head. “I’m right here!”  
  
 _Charging... Clear!_  
  
Logan drops to his knees, pressing both hands to his head. Someone is screaming. He thinks it might be him.   
  
 _Nothing, doc. Up the voltage. Alright, let’s try this again. Clear!_  
  
The white light is fading and the sights and the sounds of pre-Pulse Seattle are starting to swim back into focus.   
  
 _We’ve got a rhythm,_  the voice says.  _Guy’s a fighter._  
  
“Damn right, I’m a fighter,” Logan mutters and he slowly wraps the gun and the knife back into his clothes and places it back in the duffle bag. He feels around in the pockets of his jacket for any other clues. There are a pair of sunglasses in one pocket and in the other, a small collect of fake IDs all bearing his picture and a different name. He takes a deep breath, takes this in stride. This isn’t real. This is part of his subconscious mind. Somewhere he’s got to have left himself some clue. Some way to get back home.  
  
In the inner pocket of his coat, there’s a metal flask sloshing with some sort of liquid. Logan pulls it out and unscrews the top because if there were ever a time in his life when he needed drink it was right now.  
  
But it’s not alcohol, it’s water. He frowns at the flask in confusion and puts it back in his pocket. Everything’s got to be here for a reason and he’s not going to disturb it until he’s figures everything out.   
  
His hands snag on a piece of paper and he draws it out slowly. It’s barely more then a scrap pulled from motel stationary but he recognizes the handwriting on the letter as his own even if he doesn’t remember writing it.  
  
 _Find Sam Winchester_ , it reads.   
  
Logan looks at the sky and swallows hard. If that’s what it takes, he’ll do it.   
  
He’ll find Sam Winchester and then maybe he’ll be able to go home.


	2. Chapter 2

Winchester’s Impala is gone by the time he gets back to the safe house. The walls are cleared and empty and that bastard even took out the trash so there’s nothing Logan can do to trace him. But that is Dean Winchester. It was one of the things that had everyone’s parents terrified in the years he was on the loose. Dean Winchester is a ghost. He is in Arkansas one day and then a week later he in Nevada. There is no pattern, no method, just aimless wandering and brutal murders. Looking for Dean Winchester will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack the size of the entire country. Logan looks toward the ceiling, heaves a sight and collapses down onto the bed.   
  
There’s nothing he can do now. Nothing at all. Not that it would really matter. He’s exhausted. His whole body hurts (he got shot this morning, didn’t he? The action itself seems more like a dream then this does.) He reaches for the remote and turns the television on. It’s some sort of emergency room show. Logan doesn’t know which. He never liked hospitals and watching one for an hour just reminded him of sitting in one of those sterile waiting rooms. He turns the televisions off and thinks of the note in his pocket imploring:  _Find Sam Winchester._  
  
Reenergized, he gets to his feet, grabs his jacket and his duffle back and walks out the door and twenty minutes later, he’s standing outside the public library. There’s something beautiful about this place, the ambience, the smell of it, the feel of all that knowledge packed end to end in shelf after shelf. The libraries had been one of the first things to go after the Pulse. There had been riots and fires and the books had burned just like the city. Every thing burns, but paper went up that much faster.  
  
So the libraries had burned fast an furious, volume after volume going up in flames while the fire department dealt with more pressing matters, like saving people from collapsing apartments and turning fire hoses on crowds of rioters. Logan doesn’t blame them, really he doesn’t, he just wishes it could have all been different.   
  
He sits down at a computer terminal, marveling at the sheer speed the broadband has while connecting him to the internet. Oh, he remembers the way the internet had been before the Pulse. He remembers the feel of this wealth of information at his fingertips. He remembers networks of people of businesses, all wired together at warp speed.   
  
If he wanted to, he could hack into the FBI, pull up the specs to the most classified information. He could tap into Yale’s computer system and change grades. It’s all right here, right at his fingers. He shakes his head and takes the simpler route, pulling up google news and type Sam Winchester into the search box.  
  
There are no new hits after a rash of articles about the explosion and the alleged death of the Winchester brothers. Logan bites his lip and then on a wild hunch he types in unexplained, crime and Seattle and there it is. On December 31st 2008 there were three severed heads found outside a park in Seattle like a brand reading ‘Winchesters were here.’ Only that can’t be right. That can’t be right because Logan had seen Dean’s face when he mentioned Sam Winchester. He’d seen the shut down, seen the panic and the pain lurking under the surface.  
  
Winchester doesn’t know where his brother is. Winchester doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. Winchester’s looking for his brother same as he is.  
  
Logan blinks.  
  
Only this isn’t real. He isn’t really here. This is all in his head. He’s been shot and he’s in a coma in 2019 and this is all some sort of waking dream. And the articles he’s reading right now, the people sitting quietly in the corner, they’re not really here. They don’t really exist.  
  
He stands abruptly, almost toppling the chair over and stalks out of the library duffle bag still in tow. And he starts walking. When you get right down to it, Logan’s a creative guy, but he’s not that creative. He just has to keep walking and walking and he’s going to run out of streets, run out of people, just run out of details. But if this is a hallucination, it’s an incredibly vivid one. He’s running his hand down the side of the building, taking in the rich texture of the bricks and the siding. He keeps hearing snatches of random conversation, keeps seeing different bits of scenery and it’s hard to believe he’s making this all up.  
  
He doesn’t know how long he’s walked but it’s getting dark by the time he stops and there’s an odd pain just above the small of his back that he can’t explain and doesn’t think he wants to. He stops outside a coffee shop when he sees the car. The magnificent black impala just outside a coffee shop. Logan digs into his duffle back, pulls out the wallet with the ID in it and decides he can spare some of his meager funds for some pre-Pulse coffee no matter how much it would cost. It isn’t like he’s going to stay here forever. Who needs funds in a fantasy world?  
  
He orders a frappuccino feeling every bit like the rich yuppies of his youth but he doesn’t care. He thanks the friendly blonde cashier when she hands him his drink and grabs his drink and slides into the booth across from Dean Winchester who’s pouring over the obituaries with a red pen. “Doesn’t seem like your kind of place,” Logan says without preamble. He’s playing this fast and loose, just like he’d played that last Eyes Only case, the one that had landed him in this situation to begin with. Logan has a plan. He always has a plan but he never factors self-risk into the equation. Maybe that has been his problem all along.   
  
“Logan Cale,” Winchester says, raising his eyes from the obituaries to look at him. “That’s about the girliest drink on the menu.”  
  
Logan looks down at the frappuccino and defiantly takes a sip. The taste of sugar is so strong, he almost chokes on it. He hasn’t had anything this rich in years and it’s the worst and the best thing he’s ever taken all at once.   
  
Winchester rolls his eyes. “Do you remember that little agreement we had where we decided you’d leave me alone?”  
  
Logan takes a deep breath and takes a gamble. “I can help you find your brother.”  
  
“My brother,” Winchester says slowly. “You can help me find my brother?” He leans forward across the table until his nose is just a hair’s width away from Logan’s own. “What could you possibly do to help? You don’t know a thing about him.”  
  
“Finding people is my specialty,” Logan says. His voice is even kilter, not change in inflection. This is Logan Cale taking control of his delusions.   
  
“That why Bobby sent you?”  
  
“Yes.” A bold-faced lie. Logan is good at lying, good at molding people to get what he wants. Good and achieving ends. It is one of the reasons Eyes Only even made its way off of the ground.  
  
“Let me tell you what I think,” Winchester says. His voice is still low, dangerous almost and Logan feels like he’s playing with fire. “I think Bobby’s little game of makings sure all hunters pair off in twos is bullshit. I think the real reason he keeps sending people to meet with me is he wants to find Sammy same as all the other and he knows I’m the only one who can do it. And when I find my brother—because I will find my brother—Bobby wants someone there to take Sammy out.” He leans in. “And I’m not going to let that happen.”  
  
There is passion in this man’s face, in his voice and Logan thinks he might have been moved if he knew what the hell was going on. But he doesn’t know so he doesn’t react. This is the sort of thing he’s learned while working a contact. It’s the silences that get people talking more then speeches. Winchester’s breathing hard, his eyes are narrowed, Logan fights to keep his face blank.   
  
“You can tell Bobby I’m not letting anyone kill my brother,” Winchester says. “I can still save him. I’m going to save him.”  
  
“You can tell Bobby yourself,” Logan says. “I’m staying right here.”  
  
Winchester doesn’t say anything, but there’s something guarded in his eyes something lurking behind the surface that is infinitely more human then Logan would have suspected from a hallucinated serial killer set free from the depths of his mind. “I’m not saying a word to Bobby until I get my brother back.”  
  
Logan doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to play this so he takes another sip of his frappuccino, almost missing the bitter black from the Post-Pulse world. Winchester eyes him carefully and then goes back to his obituaries. Logan drinks his coffee slowly and watches Winchester out of the corner of his eyes. After he’s finished his drink, Winchester folds the paper up, tucks it into the folds of his jacket and announces, “Time to get out of this city.” He hesitates, flips the collar of his jacket up and raises his brow as if to ask, _you coming?_  
  
Logan looks up, nods and grabs the duffle bag and the coffee. Winchester looks at the drink, scowls and says, “You bring that pansy-assed drink into my car and I’ll kill you.”  
  
Logan tosses the drink into the garbage and walks out into the clean streets of Seattle. It’s started to rain but Winchester doesn’t seem to notice. He walks slowly and deliberately to his car as the rain plastered his hair to his forehead. Logan lags a few yards behind him, half-afraid Winchester is going to snap.   
  
“Look,” Winchester says, pulling open the door to his car. “Get in or go away, I’ve got no problem leaving you here.”  
  
Logan slides into the passenger’s seat and tosses his bag into the back. Winchester revs the engine to life and they start moving slowly through the Seattle traffic and toward the interstate.  
  
They pass Fogle Towers on the way and Logan finds himself staring at the building something clenching in his stomach. This is the house he doesn’t live in. This is the apartment he will buy in five years. The place where he will build Eyes Only up from scratch.   
  
At the front gate, there is a little girl in a blood red dress who meets his eyes, smiles and waves.


	3. Chapter 3

  
  
Winchester checks them into a motel off a highway in Oregon. He hasn’t said a word for the drive and Logan hasn’t tried to start a conversation. There is something jarring about Dean Winchester. Something broken about every movement, like a puzzle with a few key pieces missing. Winchester checks them into a double room, tosses an overnight bag onto the bed near the door and disappears into the bathroom. Logan moves toward the far bed wondering if that was some sort of habit. It was an odd gesture taking the bed closer to the door, the one that would leave him more venerable to attacks. It means something. Everything in this world has to mean something.   
  
He upturns the duffle bag, dumping all the contents onto the bed. He doesn’t have much. The wallet holds a little under two hundred dollars. The clothes are well worn, but sturdy. The gun is a different model then the one he uses back home. The bullets are definitely silver. The knife is iron. There are a box of contacts and a glasses case at the bottom of the bag. Logan grabs that first, thankful to have something familiar. It takes him a second to remember how to peel off contacts.   
  
The glasses are different from his designer frames back home. Slightly bigger and slightly sturdier, the fashion trend 2009 had been taking before the Pulse made fashion obsolete.  
  
He stares in the mirror. He looks different somehow. He’s wearing a plane white t-shirt with black and red over-shirt and a tattered black leather jacket. He touches his reflection. His hairs, missing its usual mess of gel is laying flat on his head, shorter then he’s used to seeing it. More practical undoubtedly, but different.  
  
The motel phone rings. Logan glances toward the bathroom door. The shower’s running. He can’t imagine why anyone would be calling. Can’t imagine how anyone would have this number.  
  
The phone keeps ringing.  
  
Logan picks it up. “Hello?”  
  
 _“Take a header into the deep end when the pool’s empty, you’re going to go splat. Law of gravity.”_  
  
Logan blinks, cradles the phone closer to his ear. “Max?” he hisses. “Max is that you?”  
  
Max keeps speaking, but her voice is fizzling out like static.  _“And even Jesus Christ himself had to obey the law of gravity. For a while anyway—“_  
  
“Max!” Logan hisses. “Max! If you can hear me you’ve got to get me the hell out of here!”  
  
“What kind of a name is Max?” Winchester asks.  
  
Logan spins around, almost tugging the phone off the night stand in the process. There’s the loud blaring of the dial tone in his ears. Winchester has a towel around his waist, his hair still damp. He gives Logan a devilish grin. “If you’re using a sex line you should know that the real Jeremy Kissinger will not appreciate it.”  
  
“You paid for this with a stolen credit card?” Logan feels like laughing. His subconscious is committing credit card fraud. It’s ridiculous, absurd.  
  
“What else would I pay with?” Winchester asks, brushing by him and digging a fresh pair of pants out of his bag. He gives them a good sniff, shrugs and pulls them on.   
  
“You can’t just steal from people like that,” Logan says before he can stop himself. Before he can remind himself this isn’t real. “That’s someone’s hard earned money! It could be their life savings.”  
  
Dean tugs on a shirt. “Hey, you know the funny thing about our line of work? We don’t get paid! The credit cards are just a service fee.” He shakes his head. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been strapped for cash on this gig? What did your parents leave you a nest egg to feed off of?”  
  
Logan starts to respond, falters, swallows, touches the rims of his glasses. “It’s still wrong.”  
  
“Jesus,” Dean says, rolling his eyes. “Where does Bobby find guys like you?”  
  
Logan purses his lips together. He doesn’t like the implications. Doesn’t like that there have been others sent to this man who were now missing in action. He finds his hands sneaking toward his duffle bag, feeling around for the knife.  
  
“Tell you what?” Dean says, voice laced in sarcasm. “How about you pay for the room next time?” He grabs his jacket and grabs his keys.   
  
“Where are you going?” Logan asks.  
  
“Out,” Dean grumbles.  
  
He slams the door behind him. Logan stares at it. That hadn’t seemed like serial killer behavior—not that Logan knows what it seemed like. He stares at the telephone for almost twenty minutes, waiting for the real world to call his subconscious back. He’s lost Max by the sound of it—he’d never really had her to begin with. He’s lost Max and lost Lauren’s cooperation and lost Sonreisa’s fall and quite possibly lost his mind.  
  
He stands up. His right knee is sore. He’d torn his ACL playing basketball back in high school and it had dashed his dreams of playing college. He hasn’t thought of it, hasn’t even noticed it for years but for some reason he stops for a moment to savor the dull ache.  
  
He walks three blocks down the road, cheeks numbed from the bite of the bitter wind and walks into a roadhouse. It’s the sort of place he would never have frequented before the Pulse, the kind of place that was smoky and impersonal and rough around the edges. It’s the only kind around after the Pulse. He walks to the bar orders a beer and starts loitering around the pool table. Twenty minutes later he’s shooting a game.   
  
He’s done this kind of thing before. Back in college when it was good sport to win money off of drunken frat guys, money that would inevitably get funneled into some charity. His friends used to make fun of him for it, called him Robin Hood.  
  
He throws the first game, half because he knows how to play a crowd, half because he really is that rusty. He wonders what the good citizens of Seattle would think of him now—the great and powerful Eyes Only hustling pool in the depths of his own mind. For an instant he thinks he hears Max saying, hey, guy’s got to make a living but it’s gone almost immediately.   
  
He wins the second game on his last shot, and the chubby redneck he’s playing tugs at the brim of his head, scowls and says, “Double or nothing.”  
  
Logan doesn’t even bother with pretext this time. He lets the slightly inebriated redneck break and then he sets up, takes a deep breath and runs the table, taking no notice of the small crowd swelling with anger behind him. When he finishes, he mumbles, “Nice playing with you,” grabs three crumbled hundreds from the table and makes a quick and undignified exit.  
  
He doesn’t know why he’s so worried. There’s no reason for it after all. This is all in his head and there’s no reason for his subconscious to beat him to a bloody pulp.  
  
Except, he rounds the corner and feels a heavy hand setting on his shoulder. He turns around and is rewarded with the sight of a fist sailing toward his head. The punch is sloppy, the movements too wide, but the thing is so unexpected Logan doesn’t have time to dodge it. The fist collides with his face and he blinks back stars. His glasses are dislodged and he tastes blood spilling out of his nose.  
  
There’s something roaring in his ears that sound like a slightly arrhythmic lead from a heart monitor.   
  
“Think you can just walk into my bar and take me for a fool?”  
  
 _He’s seizing! Someone page the doctor._  
  
Logan spins wildly on the spot, trying to get his bearings.   
  
 _Come on, Logan,_ the disembodied voice whispers.  _You’ve got to work with us. You can fight this._  
  
The man is advancing on him, holding a pool cue like a baseball bat. “I’m going to make you pay for this.”  
  
Logan fights. He knows the principals of how to throw a punch, how to roll with a hit. He’s taken self-defense class and martial arts in his preparation for Eyes Only. He’d wanted to be the best, wanted assurance that he could handle himself against a crime lord’s lackey. He had learned how to fight with the same practical precision that he learned everything else.  
  
This is nothing like that. This is a brawl, a scrum, reminiscent of his one fight in his youth, just a year after his mom died and his dad wasted to nothing.   
  
He comes out on top, the drunken oaf stumbling back toward the bar as Logan turns back toward the motel. He spits blood on to the curb, pinches his nose to stop the bleeding and savors the taste of copper on his tongue.   
  
He can hear his heart beating in his ears, echoing the heart monitor going strong ten years in the future and he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.  
  
Winchester’s asleep when he gets back to the motel, tossing and turning like he’s fighting something invisible. Logan creeps over to the dresser, pulls the crumpled bills from his pockets and sets them on the table next to Winchester’s bag. He’s not going to ride shotgun to his fantasy. He is going to take control. He is going to get out. He is going to fight.  
  
He sleeps like a rock and wakes up far to early the next morning to Winchesters gargling mouthwash in the bathroom. He’s still here. It’s still 2009. He’d half thought this would all be over in the morning.   
  
“Rise and shine,” Winchester roars. “Work to be done.”  
  
Logan sits up. It’s 2009 and he’s still here so he might as well play along. “Work?” he asks, almost cautiously.  
  
“Nine disappearances,” Winchesters says. “Nine disappearances in the past nine years. All of them kids. Twelve year on boys. Same physics description. Happens the same time of year which, lucky for us happens to be now. I’m thinking vengeful spirit.”  
  
“Vengeful spirit?” Logan echoes. His head hurts. He can feel every punch from the fight last night.  
  
“What?” Winchester says. “You really think I was going to trust you with a demon first time out?”  
  
Logan blinks.  _Demons._  What the hell is Winchester doing talking about demons. There’s no such thing as demons. His subconscious must be in worse shape then he thought. “Shouldn’t we be looking for Sam?”  
  
Winchester stops mid stride as if the question physically challenges him but the moment passes and he gives Logan a transparent grin. “We’re not going to find Sam if he doesn’t want to be found.” He holds up the crumpled stack of bills Logan had won last night. “Breakfast,” he says. “Looks like you’re buying.”   
  


***

  
  
There’s an overabundance of food on the table, eggs, sausage, a stack of pancakes and a tall glass of orange juice. Logan touches the edge of his glasses and stares at his own plate. Eggs. Sausage. Toast.   
  
He’s not hungry. Not in the slightest. Breakfast was a luxury few could afford after the Pulse and Logan himself had fallen out of the habit of eating it due to lack of fresh eggs. He takes a big bite of the toast chewing it slowly before he realizes that there’s butter on the table, jam.   
  
Briefly he imagines taking his funds to a supermarket and buying all the top end ingredients he could have wanted. He loves cooking. It reminds him of his mother and a warm kitchen back from the time before the accident. He hasn’t cooked anything significant in a long time. He hasn’t had anyone to share that extravagance with. He’d thought maybe Max would have humored him for an evening, but that had been disastrous to say the least.  
  
Watching Winchester eat is a spectacle all of its own. He eats with the gusto of a man condemned, food positively disappearing from his plate as Logan munches on his toast without butter and feels sick.  
  
“You gonna eat that?” Winchester asks, indicating his plate with his fork.   
  
Logan pushes his plate over. “Knock yourself out.”  
  
Winchester flashes him a cheeky smile and helps himself.   
  
“What am I doing here?” Logan asks, part to himself, part to whatever forces were keeping him here.  
  
Winchester answers in between sawing off an end of Logan’s sausages and sprinkling pepper on the eggs. He pauses before he takes a bite, a serious expression settling on his features. Logan can hear the wind whistling outside. His fingers curl around the wooden seat. It’s gritty, rough. He can smell burning bacon from the kitchen. “You’re here because we have work to do.”  
  
 _Work to do,_  Logan thinks. He has work to do back home. He has to wake up. Sonreisa’s going to keep stealing those pills and the dead vets will just keep piling up. He can’t let that happen. “I have other work to do.”  
  
“So this isn’t good enough?” Winchester growls. “Look I get that you want to get out. Hunting. Everyone’s got a vendetta in this business, but somewhere out there, there’s a twelve year old kid who’s going to disappear.”  
  
Logan wonders about this. He wonders why his subconscious would bring him a serial killer that sounded like his conscious whispering to him at night. Winchester stabs at the sausage with his fork. “And if we don’t stop it, who’s going to?”


	4. Chapter 4

Winchester drives just a little too fast, plays the music just a little too loud and sings along just a little off key. Logan watches the scenery out the window waiting for it to start repeating itself, but it never does.   
  
They stop in front of a house. Winchester reaches over to the glove compartment and flips through a box before coming up with an FBI badge. Logan opens his mouth to disapprove but then he remembers a similar badge in his own bag, shuts his mouth and follows Winchester to the door.   
  
The woman who opens it is thin and haggard with frizzing blond curls and dark circles under her eyes. Winchester flashes the badges and says, “Mrs. Miller? I’m agent Tyler and this is my partner, agent Foyle. We were hoping to ask you some questions about your son.”  
  
Her face sort of crumbles, all semblance of composure leaking out of her posture. “Have you found his body? ” she asks, voice crackling.  
  
Winchester shoots him an uncomfortable look as tears start falling from the woman’s face. Logan realizes that Winchester doesn’t know how to handle grief. That he’s emotionally disjointed, set apart from the rest of society. Logan can relate but he can’t help. He can’t find the right words here. He doesn’t know what the plan is.  
  
“There’s been nothing, ma’am,” Winchester says finally. “However we’ve received a tip that there may be someone else targeted by the same kidnapper and we could use your help?”  
  
“Oh,” there was a sag in her shoulders, a defeated body language. “Of course, come in.”  
  
She steps aside and Winchester brushes past. Logan stands on the doorstep for a moment, unable to move. He thinks he hears something off in the distance, but it might just be the wind. “Is everything all right, Agent Foyle?”  
  
“Yes, Agent Foyle,” Winchester echoes just a little harsher. “Is everything all right?”  
  
“Fine,” Logan says. He blinks and walks through the door.  
  
The house is cluttered, the mantel place overflowing with pictures. A little boy smiling out of most of them. Twelve years old with wire frames and brown hair. Winchester glances at the picture on the mantel and looks at him for a moment before sitting down.   
  
“Mrs. Miller,” he says stiffly. “Is there anything you remember about your son’s disappearance that could be of help for us.”  
  
“It’s one year tomorrow,” she says, her voice hitching. She sniffles. Logan can hear the sound magnified exponentially off the photographs. His head hurts. “One year tomorrow, my little Dennis didn’t make it back.”  
  
Winchester shifts in his seat. Logan imagines he is like shards of glass that every extraneous motion sends a bit stabbing into skin. His nails are digging into his palm and it hurts and it’s real.  
  
“Is there anything else you remember?” Winchester asks. “Anything at all? Did you receive any threatening phone calls before the incident? Was your son acting strangely?”  
  
“No,” Mrs. Miller says, voice racked with tremors. “Nothing. He was my son, normal. Perfect. You can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a child.”  
  
Logan can’t breathe. In his head flashes a picture, a newscast playing in its disjointed way a halting story about a plane crash that should have been just news but ended up being personal. The scene is twisting, caving in on itself and the steady beeping of a heart monitor is invading his ears.   
  
“Agent Foyle?”  
  
The world, the 2009 world, snaps back into focus with a jarring intensity. There is a fly buzzing against the wall. The carpet is beige. The couch is maroon. Winchester is saying, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Miller, my partner is recovering from a traumatic injury. He’s completely insane, but still, you know, really good at his job.”  
  
Logan squeezes his eyes shut. This doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any sense, but he has no choice except to play along. “Do you know where your son might have gone on the day he died?”  
  
“He was out with some friends. I used to hear them talking about it, but you know how small boys can be. There are a lot of woods out here. Sometimes I like to pretend he’s still out there somewhere.”  
  
Winchester drums his fingers his leg. It makes a soft, muffled, thumping sound. “Thank you,” he says. He pauses for a moment. “I’m sorry for your loss.”  
  
Outside the house, Logan lets his indignation bubble to the surface. “What the hell was that!?” he shouts. “Was it really necessary to make that poor women relive her son’s death?”  
  
Winchester glances over his shoulder to make sure the door to the Miller house is locked. Then he stands just a little too close to Logan and says, “This may not be how you rich boys like to play it, but this is all I know how to do. That women could be the only hope we have of stopping this thing before we lose another kid. Now you can either shut up and play along or you can leave. I don’t care either way.”   
  
In that moment, Logan wants to leave. He wants to leave more then he can possibly imagine. He wants to go back to the familiar, broken, Post-Pulse world. But he doesn’t know how.   
  
So Logan stays. They work their way backward through the families of the last nine years. Grieving parents all missing a son who would have been thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old this year. Logan doesn’t know what to make of it. He has no means of measuring this sort of grief.   
  
It’s past dark by the time they’re done. Logan feels like he’s frozen in a state of status, like he’s been held indefinitely in between breaths. He closes his eyes and wishes he would wake up.  
  
“You know they all sort of look like you,” Winchester says. “The kids who went missing. Scrawny. Dark hair. Glasses. Anything you want to tell me, Cale?”  
  
He’s noticed this as well. Noticed the parade of pictures that resembled the Logan of his youth. It doesn’t strike him as unusual. He’s in his own head after all. There’s going to be some reason all the missing boys look like him. Just like there’s some reason for Dean Winchester’s presence and Sam Winchester’s disappearance.   
  
“Cale!” Winchester repeats. “Seriously. You all right?”  
  
“Yeah,” Logan says. “I’m fine.”  
  
“I don’t know about you,” Winchester says, “but I’m starving. There’s a fast food joint down the street. You want anything before the stakeout begins?”  
  
Logan isn’t hungry in the slightest, so he shakes his head. Winchester shrugs and says, “Suit yourself.”  
  
The door slams on its way shut and rather then face the silence, Logan flips on the television. The channel playing has some sort of medical drama. He doesn’t like this kind of show. Doesn’t like the white antiseptic feeling of a hospital and he can’t look at it for too long before he remembers that in the real world he is laying in a hospital bed with a tube down his throat. He’s makes a move to switch the channel but something stops him.  
  
 _Following his accident, Logan Cale remains in a persistent vegetative state. Though obviously the bullet to the spine and the collapsed lung are the most primary concerns—_  
  
“Hey!” Logan says. “Hey, that’s me! You’re talking about me in there!”  
  
 _\--there is no way this could account for his complete non-reaction to external stimuli. But hope is not entirely lost. There are times, when he seems to move; motor responses as if he is caught in some deep REM sleep from which he cannot wake._  
  
He finds himself gripping the sides of the televisions.   
  
 _Can you hear me, Logan?_ The doctor’s shining a light at the television, at him.   
  
“Yes!” Logan says. “Yes! I can hear you! I’m here, I promise!”  
  
The doctor sighs.  _Still, despite this sliver of hope, the patient remains non-responsive._  
  
“Non-responsive!” Logan repeats. “I’m not non-responsive. I’m right here. Responding.”  
  
The doctor is moving on now, moving of screen and then next scene has two people in the on call room, both of them missing a shirt and Logan falls back against the bed, staring at the television blankly. He is in a coma in 2019. That has to be the case. Which is bad news to say the least because Uncle Jonas isn’t going to keep him on life support for too long. Just enough to make letting him go socially acceptable and then poof, Logan’s flat lining.  
  
He can’t let that happen. He won’t. He’s going to wake up.  
  
“Don’t you like it here?” a voice says from somewhere behind him. Logan freezes, both hands on the television. The temperature in the room has dropped. He sees his breath hanging in a mist in front of him. He can see someone in the reflection of the television.  
  
He turns around slowly.  
  
There’s a little girl sitting on his bed with long blonde hair and a blood red dress. Logan has seen her before. Seen her standing outside Fogle Towers as Winchester had left Seattle in his dust. Behind him, the television changes stations, settling on the soft snow of static.   
  
“I’d thought you would like it,” the girl says. “Everything’s back just the way you want it.”  
  
“I want to go home,” Logan says. “I have—“  
  
“You don’t have any friends at home,” the girl interrupts. She giggles and swings her legs off of the bed. “You just have me. I like you, Logan. Almost as much as I like Sammy.”  
  
“Sam Winchester?” Logan repeats. “What’s he got to do with this?”  
  
“Nothing, silly,” the girl laughs. “You’re my new favorite. It’s like playing with dollies with hearts that bleed.”  
  
“I want to go home,” Logan says.  
  
The girl takes a step toward him and seems to double in size. Logan stumbles backward, tripping and landing roughly on his left hand. A jolt of pain shoots up his arm and it feels as real as anything ever has. “No,” the girl says in a voice that is too big for her body. “No, you can’t go home. I think you’ll like it here. If you go home, you won’t have any way to run and I don’t like broken toys.”  
  
“Please,” Logan says. His voice cracks. He can hear his heart beating in his ears.  
  
“I could make it stop, you know,” the girl says. “Your heart. Listen to it go now. Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.”  
  
Logan jolts upright in bed. Breathing hard. There’s a thin layer of sweat coating his forehead and he has to raise his fingers to his jugular to take his own pulse. The television is on, but it’s playing the news. Something about the war in Iraq. His heart is still beating; ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.  
  
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Winchester says.   
  
Logan blinks and turns blindly to try to find the source of the voice. The room is bathed in light and the alarm clock besides him tells him it was nine in the morning. Logan takes a deep breath. He’d fallen asleep. The girl was a nightmare within a dream.  
  
Winchester is sitting at the table, with a coffee in one hand and a lap top in front of him. “Seriously,” Winchester says. “I’ve never met a guy who can sleep twelve hours in spite of screaming nightmares.” Logan opens his mouth to try and deny it, but Winchester continues before he gets the chance. “Give it up, Cale. I’ve had enough screaming nightmares to see the signs. You all right?”  
  
“Yeah,” Logan says. He pushes himself out of bed, bare feet landing on the coarse carpet. He wiggles his toes and wishes he’d thought to wear socks. “Yeah, I’m fine.”  
  
“Whatever,” Winchester mutters, flipping through a stack of papers. “I think I’ve got us a lead on our case.”  
  
Logan yawns and walks over to the table. Winchester thrusts a map toward him. “The kids all disappeared within the same mile of woods. Now the way I figure it, this has to be ground zero. I started looking through some old news stories and I found this.”  
  
He turns the laptop toward Logan. “A plane crash?” he reads.  
  
“Not really the right MO,” Winchesters says. “But the dates match up and it’s quick and violent. Seems like a vengeful spirit to me.”  
  
“Right,” Logan says, “Vengeful spirit.”  
  
Dean snaps the laptop shut. “Look, if you’ve got a better idea you’re allowed to share.”  
  
“No,” Logan says. He moves over toward his bag and grabs a fresh shirt. “No, it sounds—“ he swallows. “Plausible.”  
  
“We’ve got no way of knowing which one is our spook. Twenty people died in that plane crash. They were buried in a dozen different states. Salt and burn doesn’t really look like an option.”  
  
Logan closes his eyes. His mom died in a plane crash when he was a kid and his dad, his dad had just wasted away. _The universe is right on schedule,_ his mom used to say, but it wasn’t because she was supposed to make it home that night.   
  
“Basically,” Winchester said. “We’re looking stakeout.”  
  
“Yeah,” Logan agrees though he doesn’t know what the hell Winchester is talking about. “My thoughts exactly.”  
  


***

  
  
Logan has been on stakeouts before. Back in the early days of Eyes Only before he had his network of informants, it had just been him in his Aztek watching. The first few bust had come purely from Logan Cale. When Eyes Only started to make a name for himself, things had gotten easier, but he’d missed it a little. He’d missed the complete feeling of satisfaction when his bust had really been his bust.  
  
Still, he’d forgotten just how boring it could be. How little their was to do within the confines of a car. Winchester doesn’t do silence any better then he does. He drums his fingers, he whistles toneless melodies of unidentifiable songs. He doesn’t talk and Logan can’t think of anything to say.  
  
After what seems like forever, the silence breaks as Winchester’s phone rings. Logan recognizes the opening riff of Back in Black before it’s answered with an irritated, “Yeah?”  
  
The woods are all but silent in the dying day’s light. The wilderness seems to stretch out from miles in all direction. Logan listens to the strange sounds of rustling leavings and the dull roar of the wind. He is cold even through the buffer of the impala’s door. There is a shotgun loaded with rock salt shells in his lap, courtesy of Winchester’s bizarre concept of self-defense.  
  
Winchester shuts the phone with a snap. “We’ve got to go,” he announces, turning the key in the ignition. “Now.”  
  
“What?” Logan asks. “Why?”  
  
Winchester is a flurry of motion in the driver’s seat, a juggler with two dozen balls soaring through the air. “We’ve got to get to Wyoming,” he says.  
  
“Wyoming?” Logan repeats. “What the hell is in Wyoming? You said we had work to do here!”  
  
“Sam’s in Wyoming,” Winchester says like that explains everything. He slams on the accelerator and the car lurches backwards in reverse. The force of it is so sudden, Logan pitches forward and nearly cracks his head on the dashboard.  
  
When he straightens back up, he sees something, a little boy, twelve years old, wondering through the trees with a glazed look on his face. “Dean!” Logan shouts. “Look!”  
  
Winchester stomps on the breaks and squints into the woods. “Son of a bitch,” he mumbles and pushes the car into park. He turns in his seat and grabs a sawed-off shot gun from the back seat. “We got to kid that kid out of here. Cover me.”  
  
He’s out of the car before Logan even has a chance to process the situation. Winchester’s disappeared after the boy by the time he jolts himself into motion, clutching the salt-loaded shotgun in clumsy hands. He takes two steps before he hears it, a voice calling his name through the darkness. He stops dead in his tracks, pressing both hands to his ears, but it sounds different then the antiseptic sounds from the hospital.  
  
“Logan,” the voice says again, light and almost inaudible on the breeze.  
  
Logan turns around only to see a figure moving toward him, flicker a little as if she were a recording. Still, he recognizes the person moving toward him. He remembers the dark hair tickling his forehead as she kissed him goodnight. “Mom?”


	5. Chapter 5

Logan doesn’t know why he’s surprised. Of course his mother is here. There’s no reason it wouldn’t be his mother crawling out of his subconscious to meet him. “You’re not real,” Logan says firmly. “You’re not real so go away.”  
  
“Logan,” she says. “Logan, I’m home. I’m here to take you home.”  
  
Every instinct screams at him to run. His skin is crawling. He feels somehow disconnected, like he’s not really here, (and he’s not really here. Not really). “Come with me, Logan,” she says. “I’m sorry I missed New Years.”  
  
He has to stop himself before he says it’s not even Thanksgiving. He has to stop himself and remind him that this isn’t real. He has to stop.  
  
His mother looks just like he remembers her with long dark hair and wide blue eyes. She was wearing a tattered pair of black dress pants and a blue blouse. She could have walked out of his nightmares. January 4th 2000 when the plane went down. Not 2009 and definitely not 2019. She shouldn’t be here. It didn’t make sense even from this world’s standpoint.  
  
There is no such thing as ghosts.   
  
No such thing.  
  
“Come on, Logan,” she says, holding out a hand. “Let me make it up to you.”  
  
Logan takes her hand and everything fades around him. The sounds around him are muting, the colors slowly loosing their intensity. He feels cold. The hand in his hand doesn’t feel weird. He blinks and is overcome by the strange feeling of movement. He is on his back, staring as the lights flashed overhead. There is something on his face. He can’t breathe.  
  
 _Someone page Sam Carr! We’re losing him!_  
  
He tries to draw a breath but he can’t. He can’t.  
  
“Get down!” Winchester screams.  
  
Logan doesn’t get down so much as collapse, a pain ripping through his back like a bullet chewing through flesh. He hits the ground roughly and all of a sudden hospital lights are bleeding into stars which are bleeding into nothing but white and he can’t breathe.  
  
Someone is calling his name. He doesn’t know where it’s coming from. He doesn’t know when it’s coming from. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. His mother’s face hovers over him. Winchester is shouting his name. Snatches of medical jargon float past his ears. He hears a gunshot. He hears his heart beating. He sees white flooding in all around him. He can’t--  
  
\--The world restarts. Logan shoots bold upright. Air floods his lungs. He coughs at the strange sensation and tries to blink away the whiteness all around him.   
  
“Logan?” a voice says. “Cale? You with me? Was starting to think you might be dead back there.”  
  
He is in a car. The back seat of a ’67 Chevy Impala as the scenery whips by his window. There’s snow coating the ground. Winchester’s in the front seat which means it’s still 2009. He touches his neck, feeling for his pulse. “I’m alive,” he says, more for his own benefit then anything else.   
  
“Damn lucky you got out alive,” Winchester says, eyeing Logan in the rearview mirror. Logan can’t help but thinking this must be an echo of his world. “The hell were you thinking?! Standing there like an idiot while that ghost worked her mojo on you?”  
  
Logan puts both hands on his forehead. He has a splitting headache. He’s heard things don’t hurt in dreams, but this feels real. This lets him know he’s still alive.  
  
“Cale?”  
  
“Mom,” Logan mutters. He can see her if he closes his eyes. Can see the dark hair and light eyes.   
  
“Mom?” Winchester echoes. “You know she was thirty five when she died ten years ago. And you’re—“ He waves a hand vaguely, failing to come up with the numbers. “The ages don’t add up. The name thing’s a weird coincidence but the ages don’t add up. Must be a distant relative or something.”   
  
“I mean she looked like my mom,” Logan says. This isn’t real he reminds himself. This is insanity, but he’s never had a dream this tangible and he’s starting to care. There’s something growing inside him, some insidious need to make it right. And that scares him more then anything else. “What happened to her?”  
  
“The ghost?” Winchester asks. Logan nods even though there’s no such thing. “I called a friend of a friend in her home town. Took care of the remains. Shouldn’t be bothering anyone anymore.”  
  
“And after that?” Logan asks. “What happens to her after that?”  
  
The needle on the speedometer is edging up past eighty. The highway is deserted except for their car. A long moment passes and then Winchester says. “I don’t know. We just deal in spooks. Anything after is above our pay grade. Pretend she went into the light. Pretend she’s gone. Pretend whatever the hell you want just don’t make that kind of mistake again. I can’t deal with that.”  
  
A light. Logan remembers the light. Remembers how it enveloped everything and burned at his insides. He doesn’t want to die. And if that means staying right here, that’s fine by him. He can play this game. “Miss me too much, huh?” he teases.   
  
Winchester laughs. “More like I wasn’t looking forward to cleaning you off of the Impala.”  
  
Logan forces a smile to his lips and finds it comes with ease. “You going to tell me why we’re on the road instead of taking me to a hospital?”  
  
“I don’t like hospitals,” Winchester says.   
  
Logan shivers. “Me neither,” he admits. “Never stopped me from using one if someone needed it though. What’s the hurry then?”  
  
Winchester stares out at the road at the acres of scenery blanketed in a soft snow. There hadn’t been any snow on the ground when he’d fallen asleep. “Sam’s in Wyoming,” Winchester says.   
  
Something about the placement of this, the time sets alarm bells ringing in the back of Logan’s head but he can’t remember why. There is something important out here. Something bigger then the note still nestled in the folds of his jacket whispering, _Find Sam Winchester._ “What’s the rush?” Logan asks. “Won’t Sam just wait for us?”  
  
Winchester waits a beat before answering. “It’s complicated.”  
  
Logan very nearly laughs. This world is complicated. Winchester is complicated. Logan’s situation is complicated. He has trouble thinking of how anything could make it more so. “Try me,” Logan says.   
  
Winchester takes a deep breathe. “How much did Bobby tell you?”  
  
Logan considers lying for a second. Considers inventing all sorts of detail stemming from his cover and what he is supposed to do here. But he can’t do it. He doesn’t have all the facts and the last time he moved without all the facts a bullet took him back to 2009. He doesn’t know how to sell a lie in a world where ghosts exist even if it crawled out of the depths of his own mind. “Not much,” Logan says. “I think he was more worried about you.”  
  
It is the right thing to say. Logan is good at reading people and he’d guessed a while back that this Bobby character had been close with to Winchester brothers but now he isn’t. It’s not a huge leap to suspected betrayal.  
  
Winchester keeps his eyes on the road but Logan recognizes the tension in his frame so he is quiet and he waits. After a few miles, Winchester says, “It’s been the same thing every town. I get the call and I go and I get there too late.”  
  
“What happened?” Logan asks.   
  
Dean is shaking. Not a lot but enough for Logan to notice and in that moment Logan is sure that the public has it all wrong about Dean Winchester. He doesn’t know what Dean is but serial killer is no longer on the list. Logan knows a crook when he sees one. He’s made it his life’s work to spot corruption in people who generally appear clean and whatever else you might say about Dean Winchester, he is not a bad guy. He is not a serial killer.  
  
It has to be important. There has to be some reason his mind has decided to present him with a killer who is not really a killer and the idyllic pre-Pulse world that is infested with ghosts. It doesn’t make any sense.   
  
More and more often, Logan is starting to think that there is no pattern to this world. No answers hidden in empty graves. More and more, he is starting to think he is simply insane.  
  
“I’m too late,” Winchester says. “I get to the town a day behind and Sam’s gone and people are dead and I know Bobby thinks Sammy’s the one who did it.”  
  
“Thinks?” Logan repeats.  
  
Winchester flinches. “He saw it. He says he saw it. Sam had left a few days before and by the time I got there, Bobby was ready to shoot to kill. I stopped him. Haven’t said two words to him since. He let me be for a few weeks and then started sending guys like you along. Said no one should be doing this job alone. The hell of it is, I might appreciate the company if I didn’t know they were all looking to off my brother at first sight.”  
  
In the backseat, Logan stares at his hands and thinks of a gun loaded with silver bullets and how it would feel to pull the trigger. He can’t think of anything to say.  
  
“So,” Winchester says, knuckles white on the steering wheel, “that’s the story. Bobby thinks my brother’s gone dark side. Me, I don’t care what happened either way because I’m going to get him back.”  
  
There’s incredible force in that sentiment. Something Logan isn’t expecting. And in that moment, he envies Dean Winchester just a little because Dean’s got complete faith in someone. He’s used to having a partner, someone he can lean on.  
  
And Logan’s never had that before. Sure he’s worked with people before, but Eyes Only is a solo operation. He has secrets. He takes the risks. He doesn’t trust anyone.  
  
Dean trusts his brother. It might be misplaced. It might get him killed but Dean trusts his brother. Dean believes in something.  
  
Logan doesn’t have that. And up to this moment, he didn’t realize how badly he wanted it.  
  
Winchester takes a long, shuddering breath. “And here’s the thing,” he says. “I’m going to find my brother and I’m going to save him. If you’re just along to put a bullet in his brain, I’ll drop you off right here because if you so much as look at Sammy the wrong way, I will end you. You understand?”  
  
“Yeah,” Logan says. He’s never experienced that sort of blind loyalty before but yeah, he understands.  
  
Winchester punches the accelerator and the snow whips silently past the windshield.  
  


***

  
  
The town is full of corpses.  
  
It’s not a big town. Not by a long shot. Only about a hundred people if Logan has to guess but that doesn’t make it any better because each and every one of them is dead.  
  
The deaths are neat as far as deaths go. The blanket of snow coating the ground and the frigid temperatures make the blood slow to pool so the stab wounds and the slit throats look ridiculously neat. The sun is out and it bounces off the pristine white snow making the whole world seem unnaturally bright and overexposed.  
  
Winchester walks through the town in a daze, moving from house to house, checking every store. Logan doesn’t know what he expects to find. Maybe his brother’s beaten body curled up next to all the other.  
  
This isn’t real, Logan thinks, trying to keep the nausea at bay. It isn’t working. Logan can feel the wind stinging at his face. He can hear the crunch of Winchester’s boots on the new fallen snow. He can smell the scent of blood and sulfur that hangs, omnipresent in the air. This isn’t real but this feels real. This feels all too real.  
  
“Dean?” he calls. “Dean, what the hell happened here?”  
  
Dean kicks in the door on another house, enters, reaches, exits. “Demons,” he says. “God damned demons took out the entire freaking town.  
  
Stuff like this doesn’t happen in the world before the Pulse. He would have remembered something this gruesome. This isn’t real. Someone would have noticed. This would have been national news.  
  
“What do we do?” Logan asks. He is frozen, rooted to the spot. This isn’t real.  
  
Dean walks up to another porch, opens another door, confirms another death. His face is completely neutral. “We burn this place to the ground.”


	6. Chapter 6

“What?” Logan echoes. He can’t have heard this right.   
  
“We burn this place to the ground,” Winchester repeats. “Torch it. All of it. I’ve got lighter fluid in the trunk.”  
  
“You can’t,” Logan sputters. “You can’t! There are people here and they’re dead. You can’t just burn them up. What about the evidence? Someone’s got to be held responsible for this.”  
  
“They will be,” Winchester says, trudging back toward the car. “Oh, you can bet I’ll make them bleed, but this doesn’t need to be found.”  
  
“It needs to be found. There’s going to be someone to blame for this. The world has a right to know!”  
  
Winchester tugs the trunk open and hauls out two cartons of lighter fluid. He shoves one into Logan’s arms. “The world doesn’t want to know. If they did they would have figured it out a long time ago. Look, we can’t do anything here and if anyone bothers to look, they’re going to find some of our prints here. I don’t know about you but I have bad luck with law enforcement. I’m not getting pinned for this one.”  
  
Dean Winchester is a serial killer. Dean Winchester is a wanted man in forty-two states. Dean Winchester and his brother, Sam are presumed dead.  
  
Only that’s not true. Not here.  
  
“You’re not going to let your brother get pinned for this one,” Logan asserts.  
  
He’s hit mark with that. He can see the statement hit Winchester with the physicality of a punch. Winchester turns around slowly and says, “Sam’s not here.”  
  
“But he was,” Logan guesses. “You think he was here. You think he did it.”  
  
“Look,” Winchester says. “If there’s something you want to say just go ahead and say it.”  
  
Logan knows what he wants to say. Knows he should get it over with and accuse Sam Winchester of this catastrophe but Dean is looking at him like he’s about to break and Logan can’t bring himself to deliver that final crushing blow. He breaks eye contact, sniffles and unscrews that cap on the lighter fluid. “I can’t believing I’m actually doing this.”  
  
“Damn straight, we’re doing this,” Winchester mumbles, stalking into the distance.  
  
Twenty miles later, the entire town is on fire. Logan watches it from the hood of the Impala as Winchester shoves the lighter fluid back into the trunk without a word. Logan feels cold despite the heat. He wraps his jacket tightly around him, closes his eyes and listens.  
  
He hears nothing but the crackle of the flames. No voice from the future. No medical personnel trying to keep him alive. Nothing. He’s stuck in 2009 with Dean Winchester for company and that’s not changing anytime soon. “We shouldn’t have done that,” Logan says. “There could have been evidence.”  
  
“Evidence of what?” Winchester retorts. “What could they possibly find. They weren’t going to look at the sulfur. They were going to look at the murders and they were going to get it wrong.”  
  
Logan shakes his head, takes a deep breath of the biting cold air. “Are you going to tell me what happened to your brother?”  
  
Winchester slams the trunk shut so loudly that Logan jumps off the hood of the car. His movements are rough, almost violent. He doesn’t stop until he’s inches away from Logan’s face. They’re the same height but Winchester seems almost infinitely bigger. “Are you going to tell me why Bobby sent someone who’s never even seen a ghost to do a hunter’s job?”  
  
Logan knows the surprise is written all over his face, the guilt. He’s been lying through his teeth since he got here. He just never expected Winchester to call him on it. Never expected it was even possible. This is all happening in his head. There is no reason he shouldn’t be able to keep up the facade.  
  
But he can’t. Winchester can see through his lies.  
  
“When did you figure it out?” Logan asks.  
  
“Knew you were lying the first time I saw eyes on you,” Winchester growls. “Didn’t say anything because I wanted to see what you’d do. Still can’t figure out what you’re after for the life of me.”  
  
He breaks eye contact, circling the car to the driver’s side. “You coming or what?”  
  
Logan falters. He realizes that he’d been expecting Winchester to leave him right here in the middle of Wyoming with the smoldering remains of a slaughtered town. But he hasn’t. Nothing about Dean Winchester is what he’d expected.  
  
He gets in the car.  
  


***

  
  
They’re twenty miles out of town when Logan sees the first helicopter skimming over the treetops. Winchester spots it too, lurking in the rearview mirror. He glances right, toward Logan and asks, “Friends of yours?”  
  
Logan doesn’t bother responding to the dig. “They must have seen the smoke.”  
  
“Bullshit,” Winchester hisses. There’s a tension wracked through his body. He is coiled like a snake ready to attack. “We only left fifteen minutes ago. There’s no way in hell they respond that fast. No one moves that fast. No one.”  
  
Logan looks back over his shoulder at the helicopter scanning the trees. “That may be so, but that’s not changing the fact that there are helicopters flying in and we’re fleeing a major crime scene.”  
  
“Unbelievable,” Winchester hisses. “Freaking unbelievable.”  
  
He turns his attention back to the road only to see a dark shape dart into their path.  
  
“Watch out!” Logan screams.   
  
Winchester slams on the breaks. The Impala skids on the slick road traction completely lost. For a single wild moment, Logan thinks this might be how it ends. Not on the operating table in 2019, but right here in 2009 on a Wyoming back road with the most famous serial killer of the century at his side.   
  
But the wheels finally grip pavement and the car lurches to a spot mere feet in front of the offending object. Logan blinks. “It’s a kid.”  
  
Winchester puts the car into park and for a second, they stare at the road. The kid is frozen like a deer in headlights, unmoving as the snow drifts down around him. He can’t be more then ten years old. He has a military haircut and no jacket. His feet are bare against the snow.   
  
He is wearing a brief hospital gown and that sets off alarm bells in Logan’s head. A kid in a hospital gown. This has to be the real world bleeding through. Why else would the kid be here? He looks to Winchester, voice far more steady then he feels. “Do you see that?”  
  
“Of course I see it,” Winchester snaps. “What the hell is a kid doing out here? It’s got to be twenty degrees outside.”  
  
Logan blinks. The kid still hasn’t moved. “What do we do?”  
  
Winchester hesitates for a spilt second and then pushes the door own and steps out into the road. The kid steps back as if expecting an attack. “Hey,” Winchester says softly. “Hey, hey. I’m not going to hurt you. You shouldn’t be out here.”  
  
Logan can hear the blades of the helicopter not beating off in the distance. This is important. Somehow, this is all important.   
  
“My name is Dean,” Winchester takes another step toward the kid. The kid flinches but doesn’t back up anymore. “My friend in the car is Logan. How about you take a ride with us and we can get you back to your parents.”  
  
The kid nods slowly.   
  
“What’s your name?” Winchester asks.  
  
“Zack,” the boy says just a little belligerently. Like maybe he thinks Winchester might argue with him. This is familiar. There is a little boy in the middle of the woods on a snowy night in 2009. He has heard this before. He knows this. They are a few miles outside of Gillette, Wyoming. There is a connection here lying just out of reach.  
  
“Come on in, Zack,” Winchester says, pulling open the back door. “Where do you need to go?”  
  
“Away, sir,” the boys says, curling up in the back seat. Winchester frowns and takes off his jacket, handing it to the shivering boy.   
  
Only it’s not shivers, no it’s something different. Seizures. Logan realizes but he’s never seen a child handle seizures like this. He’s never heard of anyone who could. There’s something strange about this child, something almost inhuman.   
  
And then he sees the barcode.  
  
The connections come tumbling rapid-fire into his head. Max sitting before him as he tried to blackmail her into helping the cause. A secret government in the woods outside Wyoming. Seizures and tryptophan. Genetic engineering. facility Children with barcodes on the back of their neck. Manticore.  
  
He should have realized it straight away but there’s something about this place. He’s not making connections like he should. His world, the real world is drifting away from him and he wants it back.  
  
“Logan,” Winchester says under his breath. “What are we supposed to do with him?”  
  
What are you supposed to do with a genetically engineered super soldier?  
  
“Just drive,” Logan says.  
  
They drive in silence. In the back seat Zack is silent, surveying the situation. Logan has no doubt that this child could kill them both. Could kill Logan and snap Winchester’s neck before they even have a chance to react.  
  
But he doesn’t.  
  
Winchester talks. He tries to make a halting conversation with the boy. Asks him about friends. Tries to ask him about family. Tries to ask him where he’s going. The kid either answers with one word or lets long silences lapse because he doesn’t know where he’s heading or how to get there. It’s like his entire world is confined to a five-mile stretch of woods.  
  
They run into a road block after a few more miles. There are flashing light alternating red and blue on the tree tops. A road block. In the back seat, Zack curls up into Winchester’s jacket like he’s trying to disappear. Logan turns to the driver’s seat. “Dean, we can’t let them stop us.”  
  
“You’re telling me,” Winchester hisses. “They’re going to finger us for the town.”  
  
That isn’t what he means, but Logan doesn’t have a way to explain it that won’t tip the already skittish Zack into outright panic. Dean glances in the back seat, frowns and then reaches to the glove compartment and pulls out six different copies of the registration before settling on one in the back of the stack. Logan starts to voice his disapproval but thinks better of it.  
  
It doesn’t look like a federal cop at the checkpoint. Winchester knows just what facade to plaster on. He rolls the window down, and hands over a license and registration. “Is there a problem, officer?” he asks.  
  
The officer is a short man with a round face and dark hair. He looks half asleep, probably annoyed at Manticore pulling their people in this late. “Told us there was a group of escaped convicts. I’m supposed to hold every car.”  
  
Logan is holding his breath. Winchester has his poker face on. “You’re sure?” he says. “My kid’s out cold in the backseat. I just want to get him back home before his mother gets worried.”  
  
“You’re kid, huh?” the officer says. He glances into the back seat where Zack is curled up in Winchester’s coat. Not moving. “What’s his name?”  
  
“Michael,” Winchester answers smooth as anything. “Me and my brother here took him to a game. Took a lot out of the poor guy.”  
  
The officer shakes his head and pats the side of the car with a beefy hand. “Well, everything seems to be in order, Mr. Hanover. No reason I should be keeping you guys. You get your son back home.”  
  
Winchester takes his license back with a tight smile. “Thank you, officer.”  
  
He rolls up the window and drives slowly away from the road block. The car is oppressively silent save the light sound of Zack’s breathing. “That was weird,” Winchester says finally. “I thought they were here about the town but escapees? There’s nothing here but woods!”  
  
Logan watches Zack in the rearview mirror. The boy is still shaking slightly, but it seems to have lessened out of the cold. “I think we need to get the hell out of this state.”  
  
“Agreed,” Winchester says and punches the accelerator.  
  
They don’t stop driving until they’re in Utah and the light snow falling had turned into a dreary drizzle. They stop at a gas station and while Winchester fills up, Logan buys a bottle of milk and a couple greasy hot dogs. Zack accepts the milk gratefully and inhales the hot dogs. His tremors are lessening, but that seems to make him more suspicious rather then less.  
  
Logan wants to say something to this boy, wants to ask where Max is or how they escaped but he can’t. One word out of the ordinary and the kid would attack. They’re going to need to get Zack some clothes if this is going to work. They’re going to need to change the way they work.  
  
Winchester strides over, grinning broadly. “Hey, hot dogs!” He grabs one of the remaining ones and winks at Zack. “How you doing, kiddo?”   
  
Zack shrugs but doesn’t say anything. His eyes are alive though, calculating. Winchester nods. “Quiet guy, huh? I’m thinking we need to stop for the night but we can try and find you a way home.”  
  
He steers the boy back into the car. They stop at the cheapest motel in town and ask for two doubles and a cot. Winchester instructs Zack to take the first shower and offers one of his own shirts for sleepwear. With the water running Winchester, creeps over to Logan and says, “I’m going to want your story.”  
  
Logan steels himself, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I’m going to want yours.”  
  
Dean lets out a frustrated growl. “You can’t do this job with someone you don’t trust and you sure as hell shouldn’t be doing this job green.”  
  
“I’m a fast learner,” Logan says. “We can deal with this later.”  
  
“I still haven’t decided if I’m going to dump your scrawny ass or not,” Winchester hisses.   
  
The bathroom door opens and Zack walks out, hair sopping wet. Dean’s shirt hanging down to his knees. Winchester clenches his jaw and glares at Logan for a moment before softening his demeanor and leaning down to address the kid. “I don’t know about you, but I need some sleep. We can get you back home tomorrow.”  
  
Zack just looks at him with dark, calculating eyes. Logan presses a palm to his forehead. He is exhausted. The bone deep tired he doesn’t think should be possible in a dream world.   
  
The nighttime ritual is a bizarre ordeal. Winchester switches on the TV looks guilty and switches to cartoons. Logan curls up in bed, stares at the ceiling and strains to hear the hospital over the grating laugh of Sponge Bob Square Pants.   
  
And then the girl starts sing, “Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes and Cale falls down.”  
  
Logan sits upright in bed. The cartoons have disappeared from the television. Instead there is a surgery playing and Logan recognizes his own body on the operating table, unconscious and pale.   
  
“I don’t understand why you don’t like it here,” the girl says. “There are such lovely playthings.”  
  
Logan looks to his side. “I’m dreaming,” he says. “You’re not real.”  
  
“Dreaming within dreaming,” the girl says, “ashes to ashes. Blood like water. Isn’t it better here?”  
  
“I’m going crazy,” Logan says. “The town, Dean, Manticore. It’s not real.”  
  
“You don’t know that,” the girl says. “You don’t know any of it. Sam’s not real. Dean’s not real. Zack’s not real.” She inches closer to him, her pale, innocent face inches from his own. “You’re not real, Logan. I’m real thought. I’m the only real thing left.”  
  
“I want to go home,” Logan hisses.  
  
“You are home,” the girl says. “There is no such thing as 2019.”  
  
“This isn’t real,” Logan says, pressing his hands to his ears. “You’re not real.”  
  
On the television monitor a doctor says, “Making the next incision.”  
  
The girl laughs, moving in front of the television monitor. “Crazy, crazy, Logan Cale,” she sing-songs, “shot in the back went straight to Hell. Tries to wake up but knows he’ll fail. Down goes crazy Logan Cale.”  
  
“Shut up,” Logan whispers.  
  
“Down goes crazy Logan Cale!”  
  
“Shut up!” Logan roars.  
  
He opens his eyes. There is sun streaking through the window. Winchester wakes up a second later, withdrawing a knife from under his pillow. Logan’s breathing is coming in ragged gasps. Winchester lowers the knife. “Dude, what the hell?”  
  
The window is open. A slight breeze is blowing through curtains. Logan looks toward the cot where the boy is supposed to be sound asleep.  
  
But Zack is gone.


	7. Chapter 7

Winchester panics.   
  
He combs every inch of the hotel, knocks on every door. He pulls out an EMF meter and scans for supernatural interference. He starts making a plan of attack, a methodical approach to combing the city that would have made Eyes Only proud.   
  
Logan... Logan takes a different approach. He looks in his wallet. He hates himself for it. This is what the Pulse did to people. He doesn’t trust anymore. He can’t. He is suspicious of everyone--even a ten-year-old boy.  
  
All of his cash is gone. He shakes his head and reminds himself that this is no ordinary boy, that this boy is a soldier. That he is trained to fend for himself. “Dean, the kid was a runaway.”   
  
Winchester spins around to look at him. “So?”  
  
“So,” Logan continues. “So you were talking about getting him home and he got spooked and took off.”  
  
“Son of a bitch,” Winchester hisses and kicks at the wastebasket by the door. “What kind of place would let a kid like that out in the snow? I mean did you see him? The hair? The barcode tattoo? It’s no wonder the kid was terrified. We could have helped him and he took off. Where do you think he is?”  
  
“Probably hitching his way south. Seemed like the kind of kid who could handle himself.” Logan swallows. “I don’t think we’re going to find him.”  
  
“Shouldn’t have to handle himself,” Winchester says. “He’s ten years old. He shouldn’t have to handle anything like this.”  
  
Logan hesitates and holds up his empty wallet. “If it makes you feel any better, he’s not without means. He got his hands on all my cash.”  
  
Winchester smiles at that. “See,” he says. “Kid left my wallet free and clear while he rips you off. No one likes you.”  
  
“You like me a little,” Logan says.  
  
Silence hangs thick in the air and Logan regrets the comment immediately. Because even if Winchester did like him, he certainly doesn’t trust him.  
  
But Winchester surprises him by cracking a smile and clapping him on the back. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you’re all right for a lying civilian sent here to kill my brother.”  
  
“I’m not going to kill your brother,” Logan says immediately and he’s surprised to find that it’s true. Sam may well have slaughtered an entire town but as long as Dean Winchester has his doubts, Logan is going to follow his lead. “I swear.”  
  
“The last guy told me that too,” Winchester says. “His name was Rich. He was a right bastard. Left him in St. Louis. Before him it was Thorpe who couldn’t tell a lie to save his life. Before that, there was Jules. Sweet kid, a little bit psychic. Didn’t last long. Before that it was Kyle. Bobby wanted to come himself but I wouldn’t talk to him. He says he doesn’t want me alone.” Winchester snorts. “I just want my brother back.”  
  
“What happened to all the others?” Logan asks.  
  
“They’re not all dead if that’s what you’re thinking,” Winchester answers. “Barely half of them actually. I left Kyle by the side of the road when I figured out his game. Thorpe lasted all of one hunt before I kicked him out. Either I drive them off or they bite the big one. There’s no real in between.” He levels has gaze on Logan serious and says, “You might want to get out while you still can.”  
  
Logan leans back and thinks of the little girl in the red dress. He’s stuck here. “I’m not leaving,” Logan says. “I don’t know if I can.”  
  
Winchester shoots him a confused look but then relaxes. “Guess we’ve got to make a hunter out of you then.”  
  


***

  
  
The bible according to Winchester is written in an ancient leather notebook with nearly illegible handwriting. Logan holds it fragilely half afraid he’s going to send loose pages into the wind. It is John Winchester’s Journal. Logan can practically hear the capitalization in his voice. It’s a fascinating read, as detailed as it is scattered and Logan stays awake late for weeks reading the twisted tales of paranormal encounters and wondering how he could have possibly invented this world.   
  
And the more he learns the more he believes. The more he believes that this might be really happening. He knows he’s asleep in 2019, knows he’s hooked up to a breathing apparatus, knows his muscles are slowly wasting into nothing, but maybe he’s here too, in 2009, ten years into his past, hunting monsters with Dean Winchester.  
  
But time travel is impossible. He knows it even before he broaches the subject with Dean. Ghosts and monsters are real but aliens, Bigfoot and time travel, those aren’t. Which means that even by this world’s rules, he must be crazy.  
  
He’s okay with it.   
  
He’s adapting. He tries not to but it happens without conscious thought. He starts wearing the contacts all the time because a knock to the head tends to send his glasses flying straight off. He lets Dean cut his hair almost military short in the bathroom of one of the endless motel rooms. He gets use to the coffee again, gets used to seemingly endless supplies of gas, gets used to having Dean Winchester constantly at his side.  
  
He tracks Sam in his free time, tracing the younger Winchester’s movements through the trail of bodies and bizarre phenomena. Dean watches over his shoulder silently at first but more vocally as time went off.  
  
“You know Sam isn’t like that,” Dean says. “He always used to be Mr. Morality.”  
  
Sam doesn’t seem like the person Dean describes. Not anymore. There have been farm towns vanished and headless bodies turning up in parks. The strangest thing about this whole mess is the lack of press coverage. With crimes this sensational, it’s a wonder they aren’t splashed on every paper in the country. “Doesn’t seem like mister morality nowadays,” Logan says, trying to keep his face clear.  
  
“He’s still my brother somewhere in there,” Dean says. “He’s got to be.”  
  
Logan thinks about the piece of paper he still has in his pocket. And wonders if just finding Sam Winchester will be enough for Dean. It will be enough for Logan. It has to be. If he finds Sam he gets to go home. He clings to this notion with every fiber of his being. He’s going to find Sam and then he’s going to leave. He’s going to wake up and break the ties from whatever the hell is keeping him here.  
  
He sees pieces of the real world sometimes, he looks through a window and sees the quiet movement of an under funded hospital and wonders why he’s so desperate to get back. He hears voices sometimes, an unfamiliar voice talking about him in an authoritative baritone.   
  
“You never told me where you’re from,” Dean says. They’re in a car together for eight hours a day. There’s only so long they can drive in silence.  
  
Logan folds his hands behind his head, straining his ears for sounds of home. “I’m from the future,” he says after a moment because if anyone would believe him, it would be Dean Winchester. “It was 2019 and I was transferring a witness to a safe house and I got shot and I woke up here. I think I’m in a coma.”  
  
Dean gives him a sideways look from the driver’s seat, gauging his sincerity, watching his face. “You’re kidding, right?” he says.   
  
He doesn’t know why this matters so much, doesn’t know why he can’t have Dean thinking he’s crazy. Dean’s a figment after all, some deep dark part of his own imagination. “Of course,” he says. “I’m from Seattle. Went to school in Yale. Good life.”  
  
Dean snorts. “Figures the one who sticks would be a college boy guy.”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Logan asks.   
  
Dean gets that shifty-eyed quiet look he gets whenever his brother starts lurking on the edges of conversation. Logan sighs. “Tell me about this case.”  
  
“Had one like it a few months ago,” Dean says. “Town going crazy. Turned out it was an actual wishing well. Doubt it’s the same thing but something’s happening that’s made the town turn upside-down. We can make it by morning.”  
  
They see the flames before they see the town. “That doesn’t look good,” Dean says.  
  
Logan’s first thought is that it must have been Sam because everything in this world seems connected to this mysterious other Winchester but he’s learned not to voice that opinion. “No,” he agrees. “No, it really doesn’t.”  
  
It’s not the same though. Not like the Wyoming town full of corpses and fresh fallen snow. There is nothing clean about this. It’s an apartment that caught fire first, the police man tells them when Dean flashes a fake badge. There had been threats before a neighbor told them a girl who broke up with the boyfriend and left screaming  _I hope you burn in hell._  
  
“I’m thinking she might be a pyrokenetic,” Dean says later when they’re catching a greasy fat-fried dinner in a run down roadhouse. “Someone’s a regular fire starter. The girl was nowhere near the apartment for days before it burned.”  
  
“She could have planted that before she left,” Logan says. “It doesn’t always have to be paranormal.”  
  
Dean raises an eyebrow. “Dude, it’s been freaking years since I came across something this weird and it wasn’t paranormal. Mark my word. There’s probably some freaking witch out there throwing hex bags all over town.”  
  
Logan remembers hex bags. He’d read about them in John Winchester’s journal. Heard Dean’s rants on the witches who sold their soul for a bit of extra mojo. He remembers this with nearly perfect clarity but other things are fading. He can’t picture his penthouse anymore, doesn’t remember what piece of art hangs in his hallway. When he tries to picture it all he can think of are the cheap motel prints dotting highway motels.   
  
“I’m going back to the room,” Dean says. “Pyro girl can wait until morning.”  
  
“I think I’ll stay here,” Logan says, eyeing the pool table. He’s not tired. He has been asleep so long in 2019, he is almost never tired here.   
  
“Suit yourself,” Dean says, taking one last bite of fried chicken before throwing a few crumpled bills on the table and leaving.  
  
Logan orders another beer and wonders over to watch the game of pool, playing at slightly inebriated while he sized up the skill level. One of the kids was pretty good with the cue but he had a tendency to show off and miss the trick shot. Logan takes a sip of his beer and sizes up his mark wondering what happened to Eyes Only and his morals.  
  
The thought stops him cold because he can’t remember anymore. He tries to remember his old mantra, the old intro to the hacks but he comes up with nothing but bits and pieces of garbled indistinct words. He feels lightheaded, half crazed. There’s light flooding his vision, an odd buzzing in his ears.  
  
 _I fear Mr. Cale has shown a significant decrease in brain activity of late. It is my fear that if we allow him to slip farther into his coma we may lose him completely..._  
  
Logan presses both hands to his ears in a panic. He’s still here. They have to know he’s still here.  
  
“Michaels?” a voice is calling and he can’t tell if it’s from the past or the future or the weird limbo where he now lives. “Michaels?”  
  
A hand settles heavily on his shoulder and Logan spins around ready to attack but is greeted with a friendly smile of a man he’s never met before.  
  
“Holy hell, Logan,” he says. “Never thought I’d see your face again.”  
  
The man in front of him was big and broad with military cropped dark blond hair and dark eyes. He was wearing a dark t-shirt, combat boots and torn jeans. Logan can’t imagine a single place where he would have met a man like this.  
  
“Come on, man,” he said. “Joe Turner. I know it’s been a while but really, I didn’t think you’d had that many knocks to the head.”  
  
“Right,” Logan says slowly. “Joe Turner.”   
  
Joe Turner who knows him as Logan Michaels even though that’s not his name. He’s Logan Cale. He’s Eyes Only. He’s not letting go. There is no decrease in brain function. He doesn’t belong here.  
  
“I’m guessing this isn’t a social hangout,” Turner says eyeing the game carefully. “You’re here about the case.”  
  
“What case?” Logan asks.  
  
“The case,” Turner says. “Look. Why don’t I grab us a round and we can talk business.”  
  
Logan agrees which is how he finds himself in a secluded booth with Joe Turner and a few empty bottles of beer.  
  
“There’s a demon in town,” Turner tells him eventually. “A crossroads demon I think or at least something similar. It’s offering up trades. Something of yours and he gives you the power to do whatever you like.”  
  
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” Logan mutters.   
  
Turner snorts. “Not so bad? The last girl, the one who blew boyfriend’s pad sky high? She told the demon she wanted to be stronger. He asked for her love in return. Wham bam, instant homicide. Another kid wanted girls to like him. Cost him his kid sister. A cop wanted to be obeyed you can imagine how well that turned out. Thing people don’t realize about getting that much power is it’ll rot away your soul inside out. Once you let something like that in—willingly. There’s no turning back.”  
  
“So what?” Logan asks. “We’ve got some demon dousing up normal people with power and then taking back the one key to their self control in payment?”  
  
“Sounds about right,” Turner says, signaling the barkeeper for another round. “Paid me a visit a few days ago. Said if I got off his back, I could have anything I wanted. I told him to shove it up his ass.” He drums his fingers on the table. “Look, I know you and Winchester are here about the case, but the thing made this one personal. I need to take it down myself. There are other cases out there but this one’s mine.”  
  
Logan stares at the beer in his hand, takes a long swallow and says nothing.   
  
Turner hesitates a long moment and then leans in closer. “How are you doing, Michaels? Last I heard you weren’t in the best place out there.”  
  
 _My name is not Michaels,_ Logan wants to scream. _My name is Logan Cale and I was shot and I woke up in 2009._ “I’m fine,” he says. “Why would I be anything else?”  
  
“Because you spent six months in a mental institution,” Turner says like it should be obvious. “That’s going to mess with anyone’s sense of reality, Michaels. Even if you don’t have the hunt hanging over your head.”  
  
“What?” Logan says. Everything around him feels too loud, too jumbled. The clank of pool balls, the slosh of beer in glasses. The voices all converging into one.   
  
“Look,” Turner says. “It’s a touchy subject. I get that. But if you’re still you know.” He whistled and tapped his forehead. “You shouldn’t really be working something like this. That’s the kind of stuff that gets your allies killed.”  
  
“I know what’s real,” Logan says.  
  
“Keep it that way,” Turner says. “From what I’ve heard about Winchester, you’re going to need every ounce of brain power functioning.” He stood up to leave. “I’ve got this case covered. If you’re on Sam Winchester’s trail you’ve already got a bigger shit storm then you need.”  
  
“Stay away from Sam,” Logan says automatically. Sam is his to find and Dean’s to lose. This man has no business even mentioning him. Logan looks down at the array of bottles in front of him. He feels more then a little buzzed now. He doesn’t know if it’s from the alcohol consumed or a change in the medication they’re giving him in the future. He has never been to a mental institution. He is Logan Cale. He is Eyes Only. He is in a coma. He is back in time. He is going to get back. There is no decrease in brain function.  
  
“Taking the Winchester side, huh, Michaels?” Turner says.   
  
Logan fumbles for his wallet, muttering, “This is a—a—streaming freedom video—broadcast. No Bulletin. This is a streaming freedom video bulletin. That’s it.”  
  
Turner barks out a friendly laugh. “What the hell are you on about, Michaels?”  
  
“My name is Cale,” Logan says. “My name is Logan Cale.”  
  
“Right,” Turner says, hauling Logan to his feet. “You’re wasted.”  
  
“This isn’t real,” Logan says. “You’re not real. They say my brain function is-is-is going down. But it’s not. I’m still here.”  
  
“Where’s your motel?” Turner asks, slinging an arm under Logan’s. “We should get you back to the room before someone else decides you’re better off back in an asylum.”  
  
“I’m not crazy,” Logan says. The weight of his eyelids is suddenly unbearable. “I’m not crazy.”  
  
“Whatever you say, Michaels,” Turner mutters.  
  
 _It’s Cale,_  Logan thinks.  
  


***

  
  
He wakes up in the hotel room to the sound of heavy breathing. A quick glance to the other bed in the room proves reveals a missing Dean Winchester. That’s not unusual. Dean doesn’t tend to sleep much and midnight drives and midnight snack have been the norm for a long time.  
  
What’s unusual is the man perched on the table watching him as he sleeps he sits up warily because this isn’t really all that much stranger then the demonic girl in the red dress. He is small and gray-haired with a bland face and an even blander outfit. “Go away,” Logan says.  
  
The corners of the man’s face curve upward. He lowers himself down from the table and adjusts his tie. “You wouldn’t want me to go away,” he says confident. “I have something you might want.”  
  
A chill creeps down Logan’s spine and he realizes that this isn’t a dream. He can see the bag of weapons just behind the man’s back but there’s no way to get to it without going through the man himself. The only chance he had was the knife Dean kept under his pillow as he slept. “What could you possibly have that I want?” Logan asks.  
  
The man’s grin widens, an odd glint in his eyes. “Why, Logan, I have a way to get you home.”  
  
Home. Logan’s breath catches in his throat. A way home. He thinks of the doctors whispering about decreasing brain function and the missing pieces of Eye Only’s mantra. “Home?” he whispers, voice cracking.   
  
“Home,” the man confirms, his eyes flashing red. “Let’s make a deal.”


	8. Chapter 8

“A deal?” Logan stammers. He feels stone cold sober now. The clock on the nightstand reads 6:32, a mere four hours after Joe Turner had deposited him in the motel. The sun is yet to rise. “You can get me home?”  
  
“I can get you anything you like,” the demon says, approaching him slowly. “If you want to go home, I can get you home. All I require is a simple fee.”  
  
Alarm bells are ringing in Logan’s mind. Isn’t that what Turner was talking about last night? Something about deals gone wrong and people drunk on power. But there’s also the disembodied voice of the future saying he has suffered a decrease in brain function and then nothing since then. Not a peep from a radio. None of the doctors from the television discussing his case. Just 2009 and Joe Turner who told him he’d been in a mental institution for six months.  
  
Logan Michaels in a mental institution. It can’t be true though it sound like a better reason for his predicament then transportation from the future or a wild unbelievably real coma dream.  
  
“So,” the demon says, his eyes flashing red. “What will it be, Cale—or is it Michaels? Do you stay here in this life or do you go home with only a nominal fee?”  
  
“My name is not Michaels,” Logan says and he believes it. He believes it with the kind of desperation only those with lingering doubts have. “My name is not Michaels and this isn’t real. How could you possibly get me back home if none of this is real?”  
  
“If none of this is real,” the demon says. “Then what’s the harm in trying?”  
  
“What do you want from me?”  
  
“Not a big price to pay,” the demon said, voice dripping with honey. “Especially considering it’s something you’ve already lost. I want you off my trail for good. I want you off the hunt.”  
  
“I never wanted to be on the hunt,” Logan says. His brain is full of facts about the hunt about demons and monsters and things his worst nightmares hadn’t been able to conjure up. He’s missing other things, important things. Like how old his Uncle Jonas was or what his mom bought him for his last Christmas with her. “I just want to go back. What do you want from me?”  
  
The man smiles. He is not a frightening man. He is bald and pink-cheeked with blue eyes that flashed red. Logan is terrified though he knows he shouldn’t be. The man sets a cold hand on his arm. “Why, my dear boy, I want an assurance. Like I said, nothing you haven’t already lost. Bullet to the spinal cortex only has one end result.”  
  
“What?” Logan says faintly. The phantom pain in his back is screaming suddenly but everything below that is dead to the world. He sways on his feet unable to find his balance point.   
  
The demon catches him before he falls, whispering his fork-tongued lies into Logan’s ears. “Wouldn’t be so bad, now would it? It’s going to happen if I take it or not. Logan Michaels in his wheelchair in the institution—or is it Logan Cale sent back from the future? Either way I can take you home. All I ask is your legs. Do we have a deal Logan Cale? It’s not much to give considering they’re gone already.”  
  
Logan closes his eyes and thinks of the accident. The shootout. The thing that brought him here. How many shots had been fired? He knows he’d been hit but he isn’t sure where. All he had been aware of was his grip on the girl in his arms, the feel of hot blood slicking the pavement and the blinding white of the cloudy sky. Then he woke up and it was 2009.   
  
It is 2009.   
  
It is still 2009 even though 2009 happened ten years ago.  
  
“What’s it going to be, Logan?” the demon asks. “Back to the real world? Do we have a deal?”  
  
Logan opens his mouth, ready to say yes, ready to try anything that gets him back to a world where things make sense but something won’t let him actually say the words. Maybe it has something to do with the way the demon’s eyes glint red in the sun’s slow rise or maybe it is Dean Winchester who despite everything is Logan’s friend. But Logan Michaels and the mental institution looms over in his head and post-Pulse Seattle needs Eyes Only almost as much as he needs confirmation of his sanity.   
  
“LOGAN!” someone screams from the doorway. The demon turns around and Logan can see past him to Dean Winchester standing in the doorway, knife in one hand, posed to attack.  
  
“Winchester,” the demon says, standing up and stepping toward him. “Dean Winchester. I could give you your brother back just the way he was if you—“  
  
The knife finds its way the demons chest and then Winchester rips the blade upward. Logan watches open mouthed as the corpse, flickering slightly as if it had been electrocuted, topples gracelessly to the floor, blood spreading slowly out on the carpet.   
  
“Holy shit,” Logan mutters. “Holy shit!”  
  
Winchester wipes the blade on the his shirt leaving a thick red smear against the whites shirt. “What the hell?” Logan hisses. “You just killed a guy, Dean! You just killed a guy.”   
  
“I just killed a demon,” Dean says. “And I just saved your sorry ass. What the hell kind of deal was it angling at? Logan, you can’t go making deals with demons. It’s the kind of thing that comes back to bite you in the ass. Take it from someone with experience. Not much is worth an eternity in hell.”  
  
Logan can’t take his eyes off the body, blood seeping out of its mouth. The scene flickers a second and it’s not a demon dead on the carpet but rather himself, Logan Cale, staring straight at the sky as his blood leaked onto the pavement.   
  
“Get up,” Dean hisses. “Get your stuff. We’ve got to get out of here.”  
  
“You killed a guy,” Logan repeats. He wants to go home. This isn’t normal. This shouldn’t be this run of the mill. A dead body is something to be avenged not tossed aside. It shouldn’t feel like there is a war going on.   
  
“We can debate the morals later when we’re two states away but in case you haven’t noticed there’s a corpse in here. We’ve got to skip town.”  
  
There is a knock at the doorframe. The door that is yawning wide open. Dean turns around drawing a gun from his waistband. “Who the hell are you?”  
  
Logan recognizes the figure. The thick build that looks a good deal less fuzzy in the light of day. “Joe Turner,” the man says. “I’m a friend of Logan’s.”  
  
“He’s a hunter,” Logan says, the title thick and strange on his lips. “Met him last night. After the same thing we are.”  
  
“All signs say it’s coming here,” Turner says. “I’ve been tracking it.”  
  
“Sorry, Turner,” Dean says. “Beat you to this one. It’s dead.”  
  
Turner steps carefully into the room, surveying the body. “How do you kill a demon? Best I can ever come up with is an exorcism.”  
  
“Doesn’t matter,” Dean snaps, hauling Logan to his feet. “What matters is it’s not coming back.”  
  
“You should get out of here,” Turner says, eyes settled on Logan.   
  
“Read my mind,” Dean growls.  
  
“Get out of here,” Turner says. “I can take care of the body.”  
  
“Take care of the body?” Logan sputters. “There was a person in there. He doesn’t deserved to get tossed in some unmarked grave!”  
  
Dean slung his bag over his shoulder and maneuvered Logan out the door. “Sorry about him, dude,” he says passing Turner. “Guy’s barely past a civilian.”  
  
“Don’t have to tell me that much. Michaels there seems like a barrel of laughs.”  
  
Dean hesitates just a second at the door staring at Logan. Logan braces himself for the fallout but Dean doesn’t say a word to him, just grumbles a gruff thanks to Turner and sets about putting the town in their rearview mirror. He doesn’t say a word until they cross the state line. Logan fidgets in his seat, straining for a sign from the other world, something to ground him let him know he’s not insane. He doesn’t get it.  
  
“Who the hell is Michaels?” Dean asks.  
  
Logan swallows and contemplates the lie. He’s tired of lying. Tired of pretending this is the world he knows. So he swallows and settles on the truth. “I don’t know,” he says. “Turner acted like he knew me when I’ve never seen him before in my life. He thought my name was Logan Michaels.”  
  
“Is your name Logan Michaels?” Dean ventures.  
  
“No!” Logan says with more force then he intended. “It’s Cale. Logan Cale. Same as it has been my whole life.”  
  
“All right then,” Dean says.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I believe you,” Dean says. “You’d have to be pretty stupid to lie about something like that.”  
  
Logan wants to say something else. Wants to ask how someone who just killed a man can be so quick to trust. Wants to tell him a thousand other things about his life back home and the Pulse and Eyes Only but he can’t make himself say it. No matter how real this world feels, Dean’s a figment of his imagination. If he lets his guard down here, if he starts believing in the illusion, he’s going to fade away in 2019. He hasn’t heard a word since the doctor whispered about decreasing brain activity and he can’t help but think that this might be it. The more he lets himself fall, the second he starts believing this world is real, he’s gone.   
  
“Decrease in brain activity,” a voice says from the back seat, an eerie mockery of the doctor’s words. Logan spins in his seat to see the girl sitting in the back seat with her blood red dress and an eerie smile. “Your heart isn’t going to beat forever. Round and round and round you go. When it stops how will you know?”  
  
“It’s not going to stop,” Logan says. “I’m not going to die.”  
  
“How do you know it hasn’t already stopped forever?” the girl retorts. “I’ll get to keep my new toy.”  
  
“You’re not real,” Logan says turning back to face the road. He can still see her face in the rearview mirror, twisting into a sneer. Beside him, Dean sat silent, bobbing his head to music Logan can no longer hear.  
  
“This is all a fairy tale,” the girl mocks. “Sleeping beauty but no one’s there. She’d kiss you awake but she doesn’t care. Can I tell you a secret, Logan?” the girl leans in close to him lips inches away from his ears. “There is a way out.”  
  
“Why would I trust you?”  
  
“This world is make believe,” the girl says. “That world is make believe. You have to make a choice. Stay or go. If you’re in one place you can’t be in both. Eenie meanie miney mo. Which world’s real you’d like to know.”  
  
“How do I get back?” Logan hisses. His fingers are itching to seize the demon child by the throat but untold terror holds him back. “Tell me!”  
  
“Take a chance and take a plunge,” the girl says. “The best part about falling is —”  
  
Logan wakes up. The impala is cruising along at eighty miles an hour. He thinks of the red-eyed demon and his offer to bring him home. He wishes had the chance to make that deal. It would have been worth the price. He needs to get out of here. He needs to get out of this broken world and back into his broken world.  
  
“You all right?” Dean asks from the driver’s seat.   
  
“Yeah,” Logan says.  
  
“Another one of those dreams,” Dean hedges feeling him out.  
  
Logan closes his eyes. “Yes. Another one of those dreams.”  
  
“You want to talk about it?”  
  
He does want to talk about it but he doesn’t know how to start. He closes his eyes and tries to summon the fantastic tale to his lips. Thinks of words he could use to explain the pulse, Eyes Only and a bullet wound that knocked him back ten years.   
  
The phone rings. The car swerves slight as Dean reaches over to pick it up. He glances at Logan for the barest of a second, turns off the radio and switches the phone to speaker. “Hello,” Dean says.   
  
“Stanford,” a deep voice says.  
  
“Sammy?” Dean asks. “Sammy is that you?”  
  
“Stanford,” Sam says again. “See you there.”  
  
“Sam!” Dean calls. “Sam don’t you dare hang—“ The dial tone blares. Dean curses. “Son of a bitch,” he says signaling for the next exit.  
  
“We’re not that far,” Logan says, “maybe we can make it before.”  
  
“We need to stop him,” Dean says, punching the accelerator. “I need to save him.”  
  
Logan needs to save him too because at this moment, saving Sam Winchester’s the only clue he’s got left to saving himself.  
  


***

  
  
The closer they get to Stanford, the more on edge Logan feels. There is something familiar about this whole thing. About this place. There is a cold in his stomach he hasn’t felt since seeing his mother’s ghost. Dean watches him out of the corner of his eyes, worried about him but more worried about Sam.   
  
Stanford isn’t on fire when they get there and the normal hustle and bustle of campus life tells them both that there has not been a campus tragedy. They spend the afternoon asking around for any sign of supernatural activity but by nightfall, it’s more then clear they aren’t going to find it.  
  
“I don’t get it,” Dean says. “There’s nothing here.”  
  
“Maybe nothing’s happened,” Logan says. “Maybe we got here first.”  
  
Dean gives him a look that is hard and hopeful all at once. “I never beat him here. He’s been gone for months and never once have I made it here first. There’s something wrong. Something’s going to happen and he wants me here.”  
  
“Fine,” Logan says. He closes his eyes. “After the town he’s going to want it to be splashy, right?”  
  
“God, I hope not,” Dean mutters, casting his eyes upward.   
  
That odd feeling in his stomach is back, the tickle of gut instinct that tells him this is all rotten. Something’s going to go wall. “What about this?” Logan says, indicating a sign on the wall. There’s a basketball game tonight. If I’m going splashy, this is my scene.”  
  
“I dunno,” Dean says, “Sammy never much liked sports. Any plays going on? Jazz concerts? Something artsy. Sounds like Sam. The sports scene seems more like you then Sam.”  
  
“I used to be a sports reporter,” Logan says. “How’d you guess?”  
  
“Rich guys and their baseball,” Dean says, shaking his head.   
  
“No.” Logan is watching the stream of students flocking toward Maples Pavilion, the basketball arena, almost all of them wearing red. Some with painted faces, others touting signs. “No, I was really more of a basketball guy. Covered the Yale team back at—“  
  
He trails off when he sees it. No—when he sees him. When he sees the twenty-year-old Logan Cale with a notebook and a Yale t-shirt strolling in the direction of the Pavilion. Logan knows this is impossible. He can’t be in two places at once. It isn’t possible.  
  
But the sight cannot be denied. It’s like looking in a mirror. The younger Logan is tall and confident. His hair is shorter then Logan’s own, streaked with blond from ample time spent out in the sun. He is clean shaven and clean-cut and full of promise. It is February 7th 2009 and Stanford is playing Yale. Logan had made the trip on a whim, eager to get away for the weekend. To visit a few friends and knock out a story on the team all in one go. He stares after the younger man, mouth hanging open.  
  
And beside him, he sees Dean tensing up and knows he saw it too.


	9. Chapter 9

“Logan,” Dean says faintly. “You don’t by any chance have a twin do you?”  
  
“This shouldn’t be physically possible,” Logan says staring off at his own retreating form.   
  
“Right,” Dean says briskly, clapping his hands together. “I hate freaking shapeshifters.” He turns around heading back in the direction of the impala at a brisk pace.  
  
Logan stands, frozen to the spot for a long minute before his brain catches up to Dean’s words. He jerks into motion suddenly, almost knocking himself to the ground in his haste to catch him. “Shapeshifter?” he sputters. “What makes you think it’s a shapeshifter. They say everyone has a twin out there.”  
  
“Yeah,” Dean says. “You know why they say that? Because there are freaking shapeshifters running around wearing people’s faces!” He stops walking and turns to face Logan. “Look, I’ve run into shifters before. First time bough me a rep as a deceased psycho killer. Second one framed me for a bank job and got the feds on my tail. So forgive me for being a little tense but I freaking  _hate_  shapshifters.”  
  
Dean turns back, walks toward the impala and props open the trunk, rooting through his stash of weapons but Logan blinks, frozen to the spot. Another piece of the puzzle that is Dean Winchester slides into place. He has been wondering about this. Wondering how the serial killer from his memories matches up with the Dean Winchester before him now. He’s half convinced himself that his fabrication of Dean Winchester was pure fantasy--born of some need deep inside him and a borrowed name. But here before him is another link between the Dean Winchester of fantasy and the one of fact. Reality and fantasy are blurring into one being and Logan doesn’t know what to trust anymore. “You can’t kill him!” Logan blurts. “That’s me over there! Kill him and I’m gone too.”  
  
Dean straightens up and turns around slowly. In his hand is a gun and a half dozen silver bullets. He loads the gun with quick precise moments and Logan closes his eyes and thinks of bullets tearing into his flesh. “I know what I saw, Logan,” Dean says. “That’s a shifter through and through. It’s not you. You’re the guy standing right in front of me and the only damn hunter I know who would sit back and let a monster stroll around wearing his face.”  
  
This is death come to haunt him, Dean Winchester with his silver bullets and the man in the streets with the sniper rifle who’d pried Sophie Briganza out of his grip and left him to die.   
  
He is going to die. And Dean might well be the thing that kills him.  
  
“That’s not a shifter,” Logan protests even as Dean brushes past him, moving toward the Pavilion and the basketball game that Stanford will win by a point in overtime in a game that should have been a blow out but isn’t. Dean ignores him, moving resolutely through campus. Logan closes his eyes and plays the only card his has. “What about Sam?”  
  
Dean freezes. The words hit their mark. It is still the only thing capable of getting a rise out of Dean Winchester. Logan has seen him kill a man. Has seen him stand calm in a town full of bodies, but mention his brother and the control is gone. This is Dean Winchester, Logan thinks. This is Dean, alive and fighting like he should be.  
  
“What about Sam?” Dean growls.   
  
“He’s not here,” Logan says. “He’s not here and no one’s dead so what’s his game. He wanted you here for something.”  
  
“Of course Sam’s not here.” Dean says. “He’s never here. And the only thing I can do right now is focus on the job at hand. Now you can either shut up and help me or—“  
  
“It’s not a shapeshifter, Dean,” Logan says. “I’m telling you. I can’t explain how but that kid is me! Kill that guy and you’re killing me!”  
  
“That guy is not you!” Dean explodes. “Look I don’t know what kind of crazy little fantasy you cooked up in there but he’s not you!”  
  
Logan feels cold suddenly. The world is spinning steadily and he can see it but he can’t find a place to hold on. “Fantasy,” he echoes.  
  
“I do still have some friends out there,” Dean says. “I had one of them looking you up while you were asleep in the car. Logan Michaels signed into the Shady Pines Psychiatric Facility May of last year. My source says he checked in hearing voices. Thought the television was talking to him. Thought he could hear the future. Now I get this funny little memory tugging me. Didn’t you tell me one time you were from the future? That it was 2019 and you got shot and you woke up here. Sounded a hell of a lot like—“  
  
“I’m not Logan Michaels,” Logan interrupts. “I’m not. I’m Logan Cale and that kid going to the game over there. That’s Logan Cale too.”  
  
“Do you have any idea just how crazy you sound right now?” Dean demands. “That’s a shapeshifter. You’re a hunter. You’re not from the future and that kid over there is not your past self.”  
  
“None of this is real,” Logan whispers. “This is all in my head.”  
  
“Really awesome job of convincing me of your sanity there, Cale,” Winchester says, shaking his head. “What kills me about this is I was actually starting to trust you. I thought you were on my side.”  
  
“I am on your side,” Logan says, squinting at Dean through the darkness. The contacts are starting to bother his eyes. It is a tiny little inconvenience that he never would have allowed if he’d designed this world. “Dean I promise you—“  
  
“You don’t even think I’m real,” Dean cuts him off. “So nothing you say right now really matters.”   
  
Logan falls silent, staring at the ground because it’s true. This shouldn’t be happening. His own damn hallucination is giving him the guilt trip. There is something seriously wrong with this scene. Dean swallows, takes a deep breath and says, “So I’m going to go take care of the shifter and you can—“ He gestures vaguely with the hand holding the gun. “You can go back to doing whatever the hell you batshit crazy people do.”  
  
And Dean leaves. Leaves Logan standing stunned outside the impala that has become a second home in a time that used to be his but isn’t anymore. “Stanford beats Yale,” he calls to Dean’s retreating back. “One point on a last second buzzer beater.”  
  
He doesn’t know if Dean hears him because he doesn’t turn back, just disappears into the crowd of people with his gun tucked into his waistband. A student with a red face and a Stanford t-shirt brushes past Logan’s shoulder and says, “Dude, no way the game’s that close.”  
  
Logan gives him a tight smile and then remembers that Dean Winchester has a gun and is looking to kill the Logan Cale of 2009. Except that never happened. Logan would have remembered if it happened would have remembered a Dean Winchester coming after him with a gun. Dean can’t kill him here because he isn’t dead. He thinks.  
  
He hopes.  
  
He needs to get into this basketball game but has no idea of how to go about it. He doesn’t have a ticket and Deans the one who takes care of most of the cash. He’s got about twenty on him, probably not enough to get him a seat. The car’s is locked and no matter how pissed he is with Dean, the other man would probably decapitate him if he broke a window to get into the car.  
  
He pulls the wallet out of his pocket to check his funds. Just the twenty. The rest was in his duffle bag in the trunk. He puts the wallet back in his pocket and feels something else. His badge. The fake FBI badge that says he is Special Agent Foyle. He turns it over in his hand and takes a deep breath.  
  
He can do this.  
  
At the gates to the Pavilion there is a student scanning off tickets. When he asks for Logan’s, he flashes the fake badge. The kid gets a wide-eyed panicked look and signals for a security officer.   
  
“My name is Agent Foyle,” Logan tells the officer with the brisk professionalism he associates with pre-Pulse governmental agencies. “I have reason to believe that there is a fugitive from justice inside the building. I’m in pursuit. I need full access to your facilities.”  
  
The security guard’s eyes widen. “Fugitive in the building? Is he dangerous? Do we need to evacuate the students?”  
  
“Action such as that would only serve to alert the subject of our presence, I simply need access to the building.”  
  
The guard makes a move to let him through but hesitates and narrows his eyes. “Why were we not informed of this before hand? It seems like Stanford should have been notified if there was a dangerous fugitive in the area.”  
  
Logan falters. “This is a highly classified situation that requires precision.”  
  
“Yeah,” the guard says. “Best story I’ve heard today but I’m still not buying it. I’m going to have to ask you to leave or I will escort you off the premises. Next time you should at least try to dress the part.”  
  
Logan gapes at him wide eyed. This doesn’t happen to Dean. Winchester has the flair for deception, the ability to sell the lie. Logan had had better luck with this in his own time but it had been easier then. Cash talked. He just didn’t have any cash on hand.   
  
What was he supposed to do? He can’t get in. Not that it should matter. None of this is freaking real. His name is Logan Cale and he was shot and he’s lying in a coma in 2019 not riding shotgun to Dean Winchester ten years in the past.  
  
All he wants to do is go back home. He’s done with this place, done caring about it. He can’t do this forever.  
  
He finds himself sitting in the middle of the quad staring up at the dark sky. It seems like there are fewer stars here, the luxury of light pollution. Logan can feel the blades of grass under his hands. There’s a sharp undercurrent to the air like there’s a storm coming in the difference.  
  
This is a dream, he thinks, it has to be a dream because he isn’t crazy.  
  
So why can’t he wake up?  
  
“Poor Logan,” a voice says.  
  
Logan’s eyes pop open and the girl, the demon girl in the red dress smiling sweetly at him.  
  
“I don’t like broken toys,” the girl says. “It’s no fun if you don’t play along.”  
  
“I’m done,” Logan tells her, burning his face in his hands. “This isn’t real and I’m not playing your game anymore.”  
  
“So end it,” the girl sneers. “Take it back. Banish the past to the past.”  
  
“I don’t know how,” Logan growls.  
  
The girl smiles, reaching a hand out to touch his cheek. “The best part about falling is waking up.”  
  
Logan makes a swipe for the girl. He wants to hurt her. Wants to kill her for taunting him. He’s never been this angry with anything before. He wasn’t this angry the day the Pulse destroyed everything. He wasn’t this angry when Max turned her back on the cause. He’s never been this angry before.   
  
But the girl is gone before his fists hit flesh, disappeared into nothing like she hadn’t been there to begin with. And she hadn’t been there to begin with. Logan realizes with a start. She hadn’t been there because this isn’t real none of it is. Not the girl and not the monsters and not Dean Winchester or the other Logan Cale sitting in Maples Pavilion unaware of the drama around him. This isn’t real. This is a dream. And Logan knows how to wake up from dreams.  
  
Which is how he finds himself, almost three hours later standing on the roof of Stanford’s tallest building looking for the courage to jump.  
  
No one notices him. There are people still streaming out of the basketball game even though it had ended more than half an hour ago and no one even thinks to look up to the roof—to look up and see Logan standing on the edge. His stomach is threatening to turn inside out. He is terrified of heights. Has been terrified of heights since his mother perished in a plane crash when he was twelve years old.   
  
He thinks of his mother’s face. Reaching out and telling him to come with her. He spreads his arms wide and looks down. The wind is stinging his cheeks. He feels the stirrings of vertigo clawing at his gut. He can do this. This is all a dream and in a dream you always wake up right before you hit the ground. He has to sever ties with this reality before he can ever hope to get home.  
  
“Logan!” a voice says from behind him.   
  
He looks over his shoulder without moving from the edge. It’s Dean standing twenty yards away from him with a look of outright panic on his face. “What the hell are you doing?”  
  
“This is a dream,” Logan tells him. “And you always wake up right before you hit the ground.”  
  
“I’m a little offended that you don’t think I’m real,” Dean says, forcing out a dry laugh as he edges a step closer. “But you’ve got to back up and think this through.”  
  
“No,” Logan says. “I’ve thought it through. Here’s what I know. It was 2019 and I was transporting a witness to a secure location and my car got jumped and I got shot and now it’s 2009 but it’s not. Not really. I was twenty years old in 2009 and 2009 already happened which means I’m dreaming and none of this is real.”  
  
“You were right,” Dean says. “About your double. Got a look at the kid through a video feed. No lens flare around eyes. Managed to stumble past him with the EMF. Nothing. Kid’s completely clean. Looks too young to be your doppelganger. Too old to be your son. I can’t figure it out for the life of me.”  
  
“He’s me,” Logan says. “Ten years ago give or take.”  
  
Dean shakes his head. “And you know the weirdest thing. Stanford won by a point. Last second shot. How could you possibly know that?”  
  
“I’ve been here before,” Logan says. “This already happened.”  
  
“The hell of it is, I think I believe you.”  
  
Relief crashes down on Logan like a tidal wave. It shouldn’t matter this much. It shouldn’t make a lick of difference if his hallucination decides to trust him or treat him like a crazy person. This is all a dream after all.  
  
But it does matter. Logan looks at the ground and then back to Dean. He needs to get out of here before he loses himself in this place. He’s losing 2019 with every second he flounders. “Then you know why I’ve got to jump. If I’ve been dreaming, I’ve got to wake myself up and if you’re about to die in a dream, you wake up right? This could be just what I need to get back home.”   
  
“Could be,” Dean says. “Logan what if this is real. What if you’re standing on this roof ready to kill yourself and this is real?”  
  
Logan wants this to be real but he can’t imagine how it could possibly be so. The Pulse and corruption he understands but monsters, time travel and Dean Winchester—this is over his head.   
  
“This is all a dream,” he repeats. “It’s got to be.”  
  
Dean swallows, edging toward him. “Look, I’ve been where you are. The whole world around me twisted and wrong. And I could tell when it was a dream. I wanted to stay. Don’t get me wrong I wanted to stay more then anything but I knew it was a dream. So I ask you, does this feel like a dream? If the answer’s yes, I won’t stop you from taking the plunge. But if there’s even the barest shadow of a doubt in your mind, you’ve got to get the hell off that ledge and we can figure this out the right way.”  
  
Logan is teetering on the edge. He looks down and feels dizzy. He doesn’t know if he can do this. But this is his way out. The definitive step. The best part about falling is waking up.  
  
“Want me to tell you what I think, Logan?” Dean asks softly. “I think the only way to get back to 2019 is to survive.”   
  
He wants to jump, but he’s not sure. He closes his eye and shakes himself, trying to shock himself into waking. But when he opens them again, it’s still 2009 and he’s still standing terrified on the roof. He hates heights. He turns to face Dean and takes a step away from the ledge. Relief sweeps across Dean’s face and he claps a hand on Logan’s back and says, “Time travel, huh?” He lets out a snort of laughter that Logan finds entirely inappropriate. “That’s even funnier then vampires.”


	10. Chapter 10

Over the next few days, he tells Dean everything he knows. Everything about the future and how he came to be here. Dean listens wordlessly for the most part and Logan can read the skepticism clearly on his face but he keeps his doubts to himself.   
  
“Still think I’m crazy?” Logan asks when he finishes.  
  
“Oh, yeah,” Dean says lighting. “You’ve blown a gasket. The television talks to you. There’s something seriously messed up with that.”  
  
“The television’s not so bad,” Logan mutters. “I can deal with the television but the little girl.” He shudders. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that afraid of anything.”  
  
“This girl didn’t happen to have white eyes did she?”   
  
Logan frowns. “No. Not that I can remember.”  
  
Dean snorts. “That’s actually good news even if it does put you back into the buckets of crazy category.”  
  
Despite himself, Logan cracks a smile. “What should we do then? How do we get me back?”  
  
Dean doesn’t say a word but the ones from the roof linger in the silence.  _I think the only way to get back to 2019 is to survive._  The statement haunts Logan’s every waking moment. He can’t wait that long. Hell, with the Pulse and untold multitudes of demons lurking on the horizon, he can’t honestly expect to live that long. The weight of the situation threatens to crush him even as Dean does everything he can to help.  
  
“You know what we should do, future boy,” Dean says as they blow past another state line. “We should go visit your institution, see the old alma matter. There might be something there we can use.”  
  
Logan doesn’t want to see the mental institution. Doesn’t want another reminder of who he is supposed to be in this world. He likes Logan Cale just fine without knowing Logan Michaels but he can’t think of a viable reason to put the visit off so he consents. Dean sets about getting medical histories and discharge paper while Logan works on the problem of finding Sam Winchester.   
  
Dean gives him a notebook filled in cramped scrawl about everything he’s found since his brother’s disappearance. Logan combs through it piecing together dozens of different things trying to find a pattern. He puts it all into the computer, arranging and rearranging the data trying to come up with something solid. Dean disappears for a day and comes back rain drenched and bone tired. “There are no records,” he says. “There was a fire the first of the year. They lost about half their files. Yours was with them.”  
  
Maybe there wasn’t even a file to begin with. “I never went to that place,” Logan says.   
  
“Well you didn’t just fall out of the sky,” Dean snaps.   
  
“I fell out of 2019,” Logan retorts.  
  
They take down a poltergeist in Illinois and Logan breaks his left wrist in three places when the thing hurls him down a flight of stairs. He wakes up in the blinding white of a pre-Pulse hospital thinking he’s finally woke up home but he hasn’t and he throws up everything in his stomach when Dean Winchester strolls into his hospital room.  
  
He hates hospitals. There’s a stabbing pain in his back just above the waist that has been here for ages but seems worse when he’s in the hospital bed. He has a pristine white cast on his left wrist and though the injury doesn’t hurt in the slightest, the persistent beeping of the heart monitor is driving him insane.   
  
Two hours after he wakes up he hears doctors outside talking about a coma patient and starts panicking only to find that there’s a man in the next room who was hit by a bus and who is definitely not him.  
  
Dean checks him out of the hospital against medical advice and Logan sits, shaking in the impala for the next five hundred miles unsure of where he is. He’s losing it slowly but surely and he hasn’t heard a word from 2019 for more then a week.  
  
He’s starting to think that he might already be dead. Starting to think that this world is his heaven and his hell all rolled up into one. The thought doesn’t bring him any comfort, just an emptiness that claws at his gut that he tries to drown with Dean Winchester and shots at a bar.  
  
It doesn’t help. He wakes up the next morning with a hangover and his arm aching with a pulse all its own. It’s still 2009. He’s been waking up in 2009 for so long it’s starting to feel natural. Like the place he should be waking up.  
  
While Dean is out grabbing coffee Logan goes through his phone for a number and then punches in the digits for Bobby Singer’s number into his own cell. He takes a deep breath and hits the call button.   
  
Bobby Singer picks up on the third ring. “How the hell did you get this number?”  
  
Logan likes his lips and stares at the edges of the blindingly white cast and says, “Mr. Singer? It’s Logan Cale.”  
  
He doesn’t know what he had expected to hear from that but it isn’t what comes. It isn’t a gruff voice with a hint of anger demanding, “Yeah, and who the hell is Logan Cale?”  
  
The bottom falls out of Logan’s world. Not that there had been much of one to begin with. He is in free fall and has been in free fall since he woke up (except he hasn’t woken up. Not really. He is in a coma in 2019). “I-I-” he doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know if he has a tenuous connection to this Bobby Singer even if Dean seems to think Bobby is the person who sent him. “I’m a friend of Dean Winchester’s.”  
  
“Dean?” Bobby echoes, something like worry creeping into his voice. “Is he in trouble? Did something happen.”  
  
“Dean’s fine,” Logan says, trying to placate the man. “It’s just—I mean.”  
  
The door to the motel opens and Logan snaps the phone shut. Dean hands him the coffee and says, “You look like you got run over by a truck.”  
  
Ten minutes later, Dean’s cell phone blares from his pocket. He pulls it out to check the caller ID before hanging up without an answer. He gestures to the door. “Bobby,” he says by way of explanation. “We should get going, future boy. There’s talk of demonic possession three towns over and if we’re lucky we can head this off before someone else dies.”  
  
Logan follows him out the door. Bobby calls Dean at intervals of four minutes for the next two hours to the point where Logan finally asks, “Why don’t you go ahead and turn the damn phone off.”  
  
Dean pulls the phone from his pocket, looks at it for a moment and then says, “Sam might call.”  
  
The next time the phone rings, Dean answers it and barks, “The hell do you want, Bobby?”  
  
Logan stares out the window, absentmindedly picking at the edge of his cast. There are cows out in the field. Dozens of them, all different colors and different patterns. The intricacy of it astounds him.   
  
“Yeah he’s in the car,” Dean says to the phone. “Yeah, I know he’s not a hunter.” His voice goes steely cold. “I’m still looking.—No, no I’d go back to hell before I let you touch my little brother.” He hangs up and shoves the phone roughly back into his pocket,  
  
“Dean,” Logan says after a long pause. “We’re going to find your brother.”  
  
“I know we are,” says Dean.  
  


***

  
  
The warehouse where they trap the demon is infused with the stench of stale blood. Dean wants to use the knife, wants to kill the demon for good, but Logan puts his foot down and reminds him that there could still be a person in there.   
  
The exorcism is horrific. Far worse then anything Logan could have ever imagined. The demon is bound to a chair underneath a devil’s trap, chest heaving as Dean recites the ritual. Logan can smell sulfur like a thick rotten cloud over the scene. “There is no future,” the demon hisses in Logan’s direction. “The world doesn’t even have six months left.”  
  
Dean reads unfazed through the taunts until the demon, writing in pain proclaims, “I am one of the hands of the boy king. You will be welcome into hell with open arms.”  
  
Dean flushes red and for a second Logan is sure he is going to break the boundary and stab the guy through the heart. But he doesn’t. He just gives the thing a tight, forced smile and says. “I guess I’ll see you there.”  
  
And then he finishes the exorcism.  
  
The sight of the man belching black smoke is the most grotesque and enthralling thing Logan has ever seen but he’s more preoccupied with the man himself who collapses like a broken toy into his chair. Logan darts forward and catches him before he topples to the ground. He’s still alive. Unconscious for the most part of the drive to the hospital but alive.   
  
When they drop him off at the ER the man pulls Dean into a tight hug and whispers, “Thank you. If it wasn’t for you that thing would have killed me.”  
  
They leave the man alone in the hospital rather then risk answering questions and Logan knows they’ll never see him again but there’s a pleasant feeling in his stomach that feels like the satisfaction of an Eyes Only hack.  
  
“I would have killed him if it wasn’t for you,” Dean says a few miles down the road. “I would have stabbed him, left him bleeding and forgot about him if it wasn’t for you. Sometimes it’s hard to remember there are still people in there. That was always Sam’s job. But thanks. For reminding me.”  
  
The scene flies by out Logan’s window. He can’t remember what state they’re in but he knows it’s one he’s never scene before. Scenery he’s never seen before. “What happened to your brother?” Logan asks.  
  
Dean is quiet for a long minute, listen to the radio’s static distorted rendition of AC/DC’s Hells Bells and then he switches off the radio, takes a deep breath and says, “Sam has this—gift I guess. That’s what he always used to call it. Psychic mojo or something but it wasn’t natural and it wasn’t right. When I got back from—” He stops, swallows and starts again. “When I got back he’d started using the stuff. It came from demons and he was trying to make it something good. He stopped for a while but we were in a bind, cornered by something too big for us to handle and Sam told me to get behind him and there was this light. I woke up two days later surrounded by bodies and Sam was gone. He opened up a door and he walked through it and I don’t know if he can come back.”  
  
For some reason, Logan thinks of Joe Turner leaning across the table to say,  _Once you let something like that in—willingly. There’s no turning back._  
  
And it sounds like Sam let that thing in. Let that seed of power corrupt him until he wasn’t Dean’s brother anymore.  
  
“I had dozens of people telling me I need to waste him. That he’s too far gone. Hell, I had angels telling me I needed to kill him.”  
  
Dean’s fingers are white on the steering while. His eyes are straight ahead on the road and he’s not crying he’s just talking with a kind of detachment Logan suspects isn’t healthy. This is Dean Winchester’s soul laid out for him to see. This is Dean Winchester wrapped in loyalty and pain. Logan doesn’t know what to say.  
  
“I told them no,” Dean finishes. “There aren’t a hell of a lot of things I wouldn’t do if I had to, but that’s one of them. I won’t kill my brother. And when everyone else started to realize that, they left.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Logan says after a pause that stretches on for miles.   
  
Dean forces a smile and says, “You haven’t left yet.”  
  


***

  
  
The next time he wakes up it’s still 2009. He knows this because Dean is snoring from the bed next to him and the motel’s tacky green wallpaper with a border of naked women is practically glowing in the dark.  
  
But Uncle Jonas is standing over his bed looking grave and Logan can’t move from terror.  _I’m afraid it’s time to let go,_  Jonas says.  
  
“Let go?” Logan echoes. “Let go of what?”  
  
A doctor sweeps into existence, scribbling something gravely on a clipboard.  _It will take a day to get the paperwork in order. We’ll be removing your nephew from life support tomorrow morning at noon, Mr. Cale. I am very sorry for your loss._  
  
Jonas leans in toward Logan and whispers,  _I am truly sorry, Logan but one can’t hold to false hope forever. There’s no use to holding a body when the soul is gone._  
  
“I’m not gone!” Logan screams. “I’m here and I’m alive and if you take me off, that’s not helping that’s murder! I’m alive!”  
  
Jonas’s form fades the second Dean wakes up in the bed over. “What the hell, Cale?” he grouses.  
  
Logan pulls his legs up to his chest. He is shaking and he can’t stop. He keeps imagining a gunshot and a pain in his spine and the long beep of a flat-lining heart monitor.   
  
“Logan?” Dean says, softer now. “Logan, what happened?”  
  
“There’s switching me off,” he says. “They’re switching me off life support tomorrow at noon and I don’t know how to stop them.”  
  
Dean doesn’t have anything to say to that, no one would. No one can. Logan wonders what it will be like to die. If he’ll be stuck in 2009 forever or if dying in the future meant dying in the past as well. He’s at his breaking point, shards of Logan held together with the barest remaining fraction of sanity.   
  
“Calm the hell down,” Dean says. “We’ll figure this out. You’re not going to die. I’m not going to let you.”  
  
They go about a parody of their usual morning routine. Dean downs a coffee and takes a shower. Logan obsessively flips through the channels on the motel’s televisions with the hope that one of them will give him an update on the future. But then Logan’s phone starts ringing. He stares at it like it’s a piece of alien technology. No one has his number because he knows no one he is here. No one but Dean.   
  
He picks it up.   
  
“There is a way out,” a voice says, distorted by static.  
  
Logan cups the phone to his ear. “Who is this?”  
  
“The Winchester brothers are a unit,” the voice says. It’s female he thinks but too old for the girl from his dreams. “Everything I’ve heard says they’re going to end up on the same side. Dean hasn’t chosen his yet but when the time comes he’s going to pick his brother and then the whole world will burn. The Winchester brothers must be eliminated.”  
  
“Eliminated?” Logan echoes. “Eliminated as in killed? Who the hell is this?”  
  
“I’m a friend all right,” she snaps. “And I’m risking my life making this call so a little respect is in order.”  
  
“There’s no way in hell I’m going to kill Dean,” Logan says.  
  
“Funny how it goes, future boy,” she hisses. “Because killing the Winchesters just might be the one thing out there that can get you home.”  
  
The phone line goes dead as Dean strides out of the shower. “Who the hell’s calling you?” he demands. “Last I checked, the only contact in there was me.”  
  
“Wrong number,” Logan says shakily. He thinks of the stash of weapons in the trunk and wonders how he can get his hands on it without arousing suspicion. Wonders if he could actually do it this if that was how it ended. And he doesn’t know.  
  
This isn’t real. It shouldn’t matter.  
  
But it does. It matters quite a lot because Dean  _believed_  him. Logan has to keep reminding himself that Dean Winchester is a coma dream because Logan can’t imagine making up someone so unique. He should have tried his hand at fiction while he’d had the chance.   
  
If he came down to it, Dean Winchester or waking up, could he make that choice?  
  
Logan wonders over to the computer and turns it on. He’s created a program to analyze the patterns that might have risen in Sam’s known location. There were signs in the days before, demons gathering like storm clouds.  _I am one of the hands of the boy king._  
  
He clicks through pages of data and finds it. The omens. The red flag gathering over Seattle Washington.   
  
Logan doesn’t know why he’s surprised. That’s where it started after all. That’s where he laid bleeding in the street and later comatose in the hospital. Of course that’s going to end at noon tomorrow when Uncle Jonas lets them pull the plug. He’s got to wake up before that. He either wakes up or he’s dead.  
  
“What’s the word, future boy?” Dean asks flippantly, shaking his hair dry.   
  
Logan swallows and says, “Sam’s in Seattle.”  
  


***

  
  
It’s should have been a two day’s drive. Hell, they started in freaking Louisiana but Dean knows shortcuts and breaks land speed records and tears through the states with surreal speed almost verging on terror. Logan wonders briefly why they hadn’t just flown but he writes it off as a need to keep the weapons close.   
  
They don’t talk about a lot of things on that drive. They don’t talk about what’s going to happen when they finally do find Sam and they don’t talk about Logan’s deadline ticking slowly into being.  
  
They make it to Seattle after driving straight through the night and they’re both wired on too much adrenaline and too much caffeine realizing that Seattle is a really freaking huge city.   
  
Dean has slowed down nod, taking each street with a slow precise pace. Logan marks the streets with memories. The place where he will live. The place where Max will work. The street in which he will be shot. He thinks of Logan Cale, the other Logan Cale, the twenty year old kid at the basketball game and wonders how he’d ended up here. Doesn’t know if he’d stop it even if he had the option.   
  
He had liked his life in 2019. It had been hard and lonely but it was his and he wants it back. He needs the drive that had pushed Eyes Only. He needs to make a difference because he needs to feel alive. That’s why he’d invented this scenario. Why he’d cast himself as the sidekick to a misunderstood hero. This was his psyche coming out to play and now he has to destroy the illusion if he wanted to wake up.  
  
His head hurts. His back hurts. All of it throbs like he’s been shot and lying in a coma but his wrist, the one he’d broken here last week doesn’t hurt at all. Logan leans back in and sees the answer looming over Seattle’s skyline. “Dean, if I’m looking to make a big splashy mess, I know where I’d go.”  
  
“Care to share with the class, future boy?”  
  
Logan raises his arm, barely even noticing the extra weight of the cast and points at the Space Needle.   
  


***

  
  
The Space Needle is closed for tourists that day and Logan knows as well as Dean that this is the right place. That it has to be the right place. Logan looks at his watch. 11:42. Eighteen minutes and it’s going to be over one way or another. Dean hands him a loaded gun and says, “Shoot my brother anywhere resembling fatal and I’ll shoot you.”  
  
Logan watches Dean’s back as he makes his way to the Space Needle, the cold dead weight of the gun heavy in his hand. He forces a deep breath and trails off behind him.  
  
A female security guard is positioned at the entrance. Dean marches up to her straight up to her and Logan expects him to sweet talk her and charm his way inside but instead he seizes her by the neck, plows through the door and pins her to the wall. Logan follows, horrified at the violence. “What the hell are you doing, Dean?” he screams. “That’s—“  
  
“Logan,” Dean says with a feral grin. “Meet Ruby. Ruby, Logan. This little bitch here is the reason why Sam started this mess to begin with. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kill you right now.”  
  
Ruby reaches up and breaks the hold Dean has on her neck and sneers. “Dean Winchester, always a pleasure.”  
  
“You better start singing,” Dean hisses, drawing the knife from his waistband, “or else you’re getting an all expense paid trip to the land down under.”  
  
“I never wanted this to happen,” she spits. He eyes flash black. “I wanted Sam using his power, at the top of his game, killing Lilith. But I didn’t expect this.”  
  
“Bullshit,” Dean hisses.  
  
“It’s the truth,” Ruby insists. “I want that bitch’s head on a platter and I thought Sammy was my golden ticket.” She tilts her head and folds her arms over he chest. “Not my best bet but what’s a gamble if there’s nothing at stake?”  
  
“Where’s my brother,” Dean hisses.   
  
“At the top,” Ruby says immediately. “He’s plotting with Lilith. They’re going to take the whole world down into hell. He’s not your brother anymore and he’s got to be stopped.”  
  
“So why didn’t you stop him yourself,” Logan asks. “I’m guessing you had your chances.”  
  
“Demons can’t touch him,” Ruby sneers. “He’s Lilith’s favorite now. Hurting a hair on his pretty head would earn you a one way trip to the special part of hell.”  
  
“You’re a coward,” Dean says venomously. “You’re a coward and a liar and a cheat.”  
  
“And like it or not, Dean I’m on your side.”  
  
Dean shakes his head and moves toward the elevator. Logan hesitates before he follows.  
  
“You’re going to have to kill Sam!” Ruby screams at them. “Either that or someone’s going to have to kill the both of you!”  
  
And as the elevator closes, Logan recognizes the voice from the telephone and knows that she’s talking at him. The gun feels heavy in his hand and as surreptitiously as he can, he undoes the safely. Dean doesn’t notice. Logan can hear the steady beeping of the heart monitor. He glances at his watch 11:51. Dean is clenching the knife at his side, staring at the elevator doors. He bolts out as soon as they open, calling his brother’s name.   
  
Logan steps out slowly and aims the gun at Dean Winchester’s unexpected back.   
  
“Sam!” Dean screams. “Sammy! Where the hell are you?”  
  
Logan takes a breath and tries to steady his shaking hind. He is only gong to get one shot at this and he can’t miss. He has to sever his ties to the illusion. He has to destroy Dean Winchester. None of this is real.  
  
The lights on the observation deck seem unbelievably bright. Logan blinks blinding up at them. He is wearing glasses today, wearing glasses because he needs every reminder of what’s real.   
  
 _A damn shame,_ a distant voice announces.  _I would have though he’d have someone show up for this._  
  
 _His uncle just signed the paper and left,_ a second voice says,  _Poor guy doesn’t have any family outside of this._  
  
The watch on his wrist reads 11:53 and Logan lowers the gun because he does have someone else. He’s got Dean. And however twisted their tenuous friendship may be, it still mattered. He thinks back to the rooftop in Stanford. The panic etched in Dean’s features as he tried to coax Logan back to safety.   
  
 _But if there’s even the barest shadow of a doubt in your mind, you’ve got to get the hell off that ledge._  
  
If there’s even a chance that Dean Winchester really exists, Logan can’t pull the trigger. The heart monitor’s roar in his ears. He can hear his heart beating. How long before it stops for good?  
  
Behind him, the second elevator chimes and the doors yawn open to reveal a tall man with dark hair and yellow eyes. Dean turns around and screams, “Sam!”  
  
Sam Winchester shakes his head and looks to Logan. “I was wondering if you had the balls to actually do it.”  
  
The room explodes.  
  


***

  
  
His watch reads 11:57 and blood is roaring in his ears. The observation deck is in shambles. His back is aching. The cast on his left wrist is streaked with someone’s blood. “Dean!” he calls through the wreckage. “Dean!”  
  
Sam Winchester strides through the wreckage like he owns it, bending down to seize Logan by the neck. He lifts Logan off the ground with surreal ease. Logan kicks at the air but connects with nothing. He is going to die. He knows it with complete certainty. He is going to die here and in 2019—maybe in both places at once. It doesn’t matter.  
  
“Dean is mine,” Sam tells him. The mustard yellow eyes glow with an unearthly power. Logan thinks he smells sulfur on his breath. “You’re not supposed to be here. You’re out of time, out of place.” He looks almost thoughtful. “I think I might have to kill you now.”  
  
In the distance, impossibly far away, he hears Dean say, “Don’t you touch him, Sam.”  
  
“It’s the only way,” Sam says. “Yes, I think I’m going to have to kill you.”  
  
“Or,” Logan chokes around a constricting throat. “Or you could just let me go home.”  
  
Something flashes in the yellow of Sam’s eyes and Logan can see someone different underneath. The person Dean had described to him all those days in the impala. This is Sam Winchester. This is Dean’s brother and he’s still there somewhere.   
  
“I brought you here,” Sam says, taken aback. He looks smaller somehow. Far away. Fragile. Logan can see Dean frozen out of the corner of his eye, a knife clenched out at his side. Something like hope is on his face. “I brought you here,” he says slowly. The pressure on Logan’s throat is starting to loosen. His feet touch down on the ground. He can breathe again. “You were supposed to look after my brother in case I couldn’t keep control...”  
  
“Sammy?” Dean asks. “Sammy is that you?”  
  
Sam’s brow creases in confusion and he steps blindly through the rubble toward his brother, the yellow starting to clear from his eyes. “Dean?”  
  
Logan feels like an intruder on this moment. Caught between two brothers meeting again for the first time in months. Still, he can’t look away. These are the infamous Winchester brothers who terrorized the country for years back before the Pulse. But they’re not that. Not really. They’re something bigger then that. Something better. Like Eyes Only spanning the whole of Seattle.   
  
“This is going all wrong!” a petulant voice says from somewhere behind them. “I don’t think I like you anymore.”  
  
Ice is descending on the scene, infusing Logan’s every limb. His vision has taken on a slightly bluish tint. He can hear a heart monitor in the distance. The doctor’s phantom voice saying,  _It’s time._  
  
He turns toward the voice.  
  
His watch chimes noon.  
  
It’s the girl. The demon girl in the red dress who has haunted his every dream since he came to this place. Logan blinks trying to make her go away. She isn’t real. Not even by this world’s standard. He’s been traveling with Dean for months and he hasn’t seen her once.  
  
Until now.  
  
Dean’s eyes widen. His jaw clenches. “Lilith,” he says.  
  
“I won’t have you taking my toys from me,” Lilith says and her eyes, her eyes are white. A blinding white light like the light at the end of a tunnel. “It’s no fun if you don’t play along.”  
  
“Get behind me,” Sam says stepping forward, arms outstretched.   
  
Dean grabs him by the shoulder. “Sammy, I’m not letting you do this again!”  
  
Sam turns and roars. “Get behind me!”  
  
Lilith has her hand outstretched. Logan collapses to his knees. He can’t feel his legs. There is a blinding white light seeping into his every pore and it hurts. It hurts more then he ever thought possible. There’s blood trickling out of Sam Winchester’s nose. He thinks he hears Dean screaming but he can’t be sure. He tries to reach out, tries to move, but he can’t. He can’t. He can’t.   
  
Everything is white.  
  
Logan wakes up.


	11. Chapter 11

His head hurts. Opening his eyes is worse then lifting a hundred pounds. He coughs around a tube in his throat. The heart moniter by his bedside picks up its rhythym. He is in the hospital. There is someone in the room in the room. He blinks.   
  
The world around him is shrouded in a light haze and it takes him a few minutes to remember that he isn’t wearing contacts. Everything hurts. He coughs again and the noise finally attracts attention from the people in the room. “Mr. Cale!” a nurse says. “Mr. Cale, are those your eyes I see?”  
  
Logan blinks blearily at her. He can’t talk. His throat aches. They’ve just removed his feeding tube. He almost starts crying because this means he’s alive.  
  
He’s alive and he’s awake and it’s 2019.  
  
“I don’t believe it,” the doctor says, moving to check his vitals. “Looks like the shock to his system jarred him back into consciousness.” He leans toward Logan. “Mr. Cale? Can you hear me, Mr. Cale?”  
  
The first thing Logan asks is barely more then a whisper through a throat raw with disuse is: “How long?”  
  
“It’s been about six weeks since your accident, Mr. Cale,” the doctor says kindly. “We were starting to think we might never get you back.”  
  
Logan stares out the window. The world looks darker then he remebers. It’s raining. There are no lights on in the city. Another brown out. Usual after the Pulse. He’s back. This is home.  
  


***

  
  
He spends most of the first week sleeping. His nurse, Layla teases him for it, laughing about a coma patient spending all of his time asleep. “Wasn’t the world’s most restful coma,” Logan says and tries to smile at her. It’s like his mouth has forgotten the motion.   
  
He keeps expecting to see snatches of 2009 in his dreams. He keeps expecting to have Dean Winchester walk through that door with a cocky grin and a sawed off shot gun announcing their next hunt but it doesn’t happen. He keeps expecting to see the demon girl in her red dress every time he closes his eyes. But it doesn’t happen. He doesn’t dream.  
  
Not long wakes up he decides he can make it out of bed and winds up on the floor cursing at ineffectual legs. He tells himself it’s a fluke. That the painkillers have dulled all sensation. That his muscles have atrophied while he languished in a coma but then he realizes that he can’t feel a thing. That he can’t feel his toes. That his entire body is dead to him from the waist down.  
  
The doctors explain the situation. He was shot twice. One bullet had punctured a lung. Another had slammed into his spine. He had cranial trauma from a severe blow to the head that he’d sustained sometime after the hover drone had stopped filming. Logan listens but he doesn’t hear. Worlds float past his ears like paraplegia and collapsed lung and bullet fragments and he closes his eyes and thinks of a burning corpse and a city of bodies and Dean Winchester looking at him from the driver’s seat.   
  
He has no visitors except for doctors and nurses. His uncle sends him a message wishing him a speedy recovery but he doesn’t show up in person. But he won’t have a speedy recovery. Paraplegia doesn’t go away. He is never going to be back on his feet.   
  
 _All I ask is your legs,_ a demon’s phantom voice whispers from the past.  _Do we have a deal, Logan Cale? It’s not much to give considering they’re gone already._  
  
Logan wonders why he wanted to wake up so badly. It doesn’t seem like this life has a hell of a lot going for it. He’s a useless cripple. The world’s in shambles around him. He doesn’t have any friends.  
  
Dean had been a friend, Logan realizes. Dean had been his first real friend in years even if he hadn’t been real. Logan misses that. Misses having someone to talk with. Misses his own damn coma hallucination.   
  
But he can’t help it. It felt real. It felt like he’s lived six months in the past while his body rotted here alone.  
  
After a week, they assign him a physical therapist. A hulking black man who introduces himself as Bling. Logan can’t help but think the name sounds made up. Sounds like more fiction then anything he saw when he was unconscious.  
  
But Bling turns out to be just what Logan needs. He refuses to let Logan wallow in self-pity. He forces him to start moving forward. In a lot of ways, he saves Logan’s life. It’s easy to lose himself in the repetition of physiotherapy and he starts thinking that maybe, just maybe this will be all right.  
  
Two weeks in, Matt Sung swings by for a visit. Logan is relieved to finally see a face that is not a doctor or Bling. Matt lets him know that Sonreisa is gone, taken out by his own man in a hail of gunfire. Lets him know Lauren and Sophie are safe. It takes Logan a few minutes to remember Lauren and Sophie but when he does a warmth washes over him. Someone out there was looking out for them.   
  
For the first time since the accident, he lets himself dwell on Max. He thinks of the small barefooted child in the woods of Wyoming. He thinks of Dean Winchester standing behind his brother and new beginnings. He thinks maybe this is real.  
  
“Matt. Do you think you could do me a favor? I need you to look someone up for me. Dean Winchester. Anything you can find on him.”  
  
“Project for your boss?” Matt asks, raising an eyebrow.  
  
“This one’s personal,” Logan says after a pause. “It’s just something I’ve got to know. No real rush. Just whenever you have the time.”  
  
Time moves slowly here. It’s been more then a month since he was shot. Two weeks since he’d woken up. He’s starting to claim his life back. He checks the black market and sees the statue of Bast up for sale. He buys it back without a second thought because Max might come back. She’d saved Sophie after all, saved Lauren, taken Sonreisa out cold. She’ll come back and he’ll be ready. He doesn’t want to do this on his own.  
  
Bling brings him his laptop from the penthouse and he’s going through his notes, picking out Eyes Only’s next target. This is something he can do.   
  
He starts dreaming of 2009 again. It was ineveitable considering that’s all he thinks about. Dreams of his mother’s flickering form and the way Sam Winchester’s face changed and Dean driving the impala singing off key to AC/DC. He dreams of running full tilt through the campus of Stanford and the feel of his toes curling around carpet. It felt real.   
  
“I feel like I’m a different person,” he tells Bling after one physical therapy session. “I feel like I changed and no one noticed.”  
  
“This kind of injury’s going to effect you more then you know,” Bling says. “It takes a lot of adjustment, but you’re still the same person you were two months ago.”  
  
It isn’t what he meant.  
  
The day before he is supposed to be discharged to his penthouse, he gets a package from Matt Sung. It’s a thick casefile with the tab reading Dean Winchester. He runs his hands along the top of it.   
  
Dean Winchester exists.   
  
But he knew that before. Dean Winchester is supposedly a serial killer. Dean Winchester died in 2008. He doesn’t know what he expects to find here. Closure? Confirmation that it was all a dream? No matter how real if felt it just isn’t possible.  
  
He opens the file. The top picture is a booking photo with Dean Winchester doing a Zoolander impression at the camara. Logan almost laughs but he can’t because the evidence is laid out in front of him. The crime scene photos. The most bizzare crime scene photos he’s ever seen.   
  
What is more believable; that Dean Winchester had killed all these people or that ghosts and demons and vampires did?  
  
Dean Winchester died in 2008 when the helicopter the feds were using to transport him and Sam blew up. There had not been enough left of the body for identification. Dean Winchester is dead. Logan never woke up in 2009. The only thing that is real is this.  
  
The realization takes the wind out of his sails and his mild tailspin sets his discharge date back a day.  
  
But he recovers. Seattle is out there. Seattle is broken and he can still do something to fix it.   
  
And he’ll be alone but that’s all right. He’s been alone for a long time.   
  
Everyone always said Eyes Only had to be crazy. Now it’s true.  
  
Before he leaves, a nurse pokes her head in. “Mr. Cale? A letter came in for you today.”  
  
Logan accepts graciously and wheels himself over to the door cursing how the chair already felt like an extension of himself. He doesn’t want to adapt to this.  
  
Bling is the one giving him the ride home. Logan can’t help but think this should be a friend’s job, a relative’s job. He doesn’t dwell on it. Back at home, Bling asks if he’s all right and then says he’ll see him tomorrow.   
  
The penthouse looks bigger from the new vantage point, but at the same time infintely smaller. In his mind, Logan has spent the last few months traveling across the country hunting down ghosts and demons.   
  
He pulls the letter out. It’s addressed to the hospital with his name on the front. There is no return address but the postmark is from Kansas. Logan doesn’t know anyone in Kansas.  
  
He tears the envelope open and unfolds the letter and skims the first line.  
  
 _Hey future boy,_  
  
It stops him cold. He takes a deep breath to steady himself and then looks at the signature.  _Dean._  
  
He goes back to the beginning.  
  
 _Hey future boy,_  
  
Guess I owe you an apology, huh? You weren’t batshit crazy after all. I about had a heart attack when I saw your name in the news. You would go and get yourself shot.   
  
We looked for you, you know? Me and Sam, we looked for you. It was like you just vanished into thin air. Guess you went back. Guess you woke up. We didn’t find any evidence you even existed. Half thought I’d made you up instead of the other way around. Wouldn’t have surprised me. I wasn’t in the best place when you first showed up and I guess I owe you.   
  
Me and Sam are around. Working a poltergeist gig in Kansas. Lillith has been gone for a while. Apocalypse averted. Sam says he’s sorry about the Pulse but between that and hell on Earth I think we’re better off.   
  
If we ever make a swing up to Seattle. We’re crashing with you.   
  
-Dean   
  
He gets to the end and immediately reads the whole thing again. It was real. It happened. He’s not crazy. He’s fought impossible things and he’s still breathing. A smile sweeps over his face for the first time since he woke up to a broken world and a bullet shattered spine.   
  
He might just survive this new life after all.


End file.
